
The ARGONAUTS 
OF FAITH 

THE ADVENTURES OFTHE 
'^MAYFLOWER'' PILGRIMS 

BASIL MATHEWS 



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THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

THE ADVENTURES OF THE 
"MAYFLOWER" PILGRIMS 



BASIL MATHEWS 



THE ARGONAUTS 
OF FAITH 

THE ADVENTURES OF THE 
"MAYFLOWER" PILGRIMS 

BY 

BASIL MATHEWS 

|4 



WITH A FOREWORD BY 

VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M. 

ILLUSTRATED BY 

ERNEST PRATER 




NEW ^UU^ YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



• /::'■ 



r 

COPYRIGHT, 1920, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



0.11 • J 1920 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



©CU571327 






TO 

MY MOTHER 

IN WHOM 

THE PILGRIMS' LOVE OF GOD 

AND OF LIBERTY 

LIVES AGAIN 



HIS PILGEIMAGE 

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet. 
My staff of faith to walk upon. 

My scrip of joy, immortal diet. 
My bottle of salvation, 

My gown of glory, hope's true gage; 

And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. 

Sir Walter Kaleigh 



FOREWORD 

By Viscount Bryce, O.M. 

Theee centuries ago, in 1620, a little band of English 
people — men, women, and children — to the number of 
about one hundred, sailed from Plymouth in a ship 
called the Mayflower to settle on the bleak and then 
almost unknown coast of I^orth America. 

There they landed at a spot where a huge stone, one 
of those ice-borne boulders that strew the low shores of 
Massachusetts Bay, is said to mark the place at which 
they stepped ashore, now become a place of pilgrimage 
to which many come from all over the United States, 
visiting it with reverence. There this storm-tossed and 
sea-weary company built their huts and a wooden block- 
house for defence against the native Indians, and pre- 
pared to cultivate the soil. 

E'ot long before an English settlement had been 
planted in Virginia, and other English colonists came 
a few years later to another part of the New England 
coast, where is now the town of Salem. But this Ply- 
mouth Settlement (for that was the name they gave it) 
was the most remarkable of the three, just because it 
was the smallest and weakest, carried out with the least 
ofiScial favour, least noticed by the world of its own day. 

The Pilgrims were humble men, none of them persons 
of any consequence or influence. But the historical 
significance and moral dignity of an event are not to be 



viii FOREWORD 

measured by the power or honour, or rank, or wealth 
of those who bear a part in it. 

This was one of the great events in the annals of 
the English race. It was the second migration of that 
race. The first was made in war-ships coming from 
the mouth of the Elbe, manned by fierce heathen war- 
riors, who came as plunderers and conquerors, and took 
nearly three centuries of fighting to complete their con- 
quest of South Britain (except Wales). This second 
migration from the Old England of Angles and Saxons, 
across a far wider sea, to the E'ew England in America 
marked the beginning of a nation which was to increase 
and multiply till it overspread a vast continent. It was 
a peaceful migration. But the Plymouth Pilgrims had 
the qualities which belong to the English race. They 
had courage, constancy, loyalty to their convictions. 
They stamped these qualities upon the infant colony. 
They gave that distinctive quality to the men of those 
northeastern American colonies which has told upon 
and determined the character of the whole American 
people. 

It was by their faith in God's help and blessing and 
by the courage with which they bore hardships and 
faced dangers that the men who sailed in the Mayflower 
won undying fame. The memory of what they were 
and what they did is to-day one of the strongest links 
that bind America and England together. They set a 
noble example for the youth of England as well as for 
the youth of America to remember and to imitate. It 
is an example in which the present generation, now 
called upon, as it reaches manhood, to make good the 
losses of the war, may find stimulus and cheer. 

A time has now come affain, as it came three cen- 



FOREWORD ix 

turies ago, in whicli faitli and courage and constancy, 
and the hopefulness which trust in God and courage 
give, must have their perfect work. 



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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword, by Viscount Bryce, O.M. . vii 

Prologue: The Adventures of the 

Golden Fleece 17 

I On the Great North Road .... 25 

II The Stormy Passage 39 

III The Land of Threatening Waters . . 55 

IV The House with the Green Door . . 65 
V The Ship of Adventure 83 

VI The Adventures of Scouting .... 99 

VII A Clearing in the Waste .... 119 

VIII Builders in the Waste 137 

IX Greatheart, Mr. Standfast, and Valiant- 

for-Truth 151 

Epilogue: The Building of the New 

^'Argo'^ 171 

Chronology 179 

Index, Compiled by Miss Edith Iverson 181 



PROLOGUE 
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE 



TO EOAM ACEOSS THE OCEAN 

How sweet it is to ride upon the surges, and to leap from 
wave to wave, while the wind sings cheerful in the cordage, 
and the oars flash fast among the foam! How sweet it is 
to roam across the ocean, and to see new cities and wondrous 
lands, and to come home laden with treasure, and to win 
undying fame! 

The Song of Orpheus 



THE ARGONAUTS 
OF FAITH 

PKOLOGUE 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE 

In the old days of long ago, Greek sailor-boys of 
Corinth and of the ports by the laughing JEgean Sea 
used to sit in the sunshine on the harbour-side, leaning 
against the posts to which the ships were warped, listen- 
ing to the stories of the sailor-men who had voyaged 
in strange waters. Of all these stories the favourite 
was the tale of Jason, the son of JSson, who sailed 
through perilous adventures in Quest of the Golden 
Fleece.^ 

The tale they heard was a very long one; but this 
is the heart of it. 

There was a boy named Jason whose father took him 
to the cave on Mount Pelion where Cheiron the centaur 
lived. He was half -man and half-horse, and the wisest 
of all created beings. On the mountain-side he trained 
Hercules, and many other mighty and skilled men. 
Cheiron's cave was a school of heroes. 

'The story is told in Charles Kingsley's The Heroes, and 
Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. 

17 



18 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Jason grew up to be wonderfully strong — a man with 
a valiant spirit, powerful muscles and a clear, quick 
brain. He learned that all the fair land away to the 
South was really his ; but that he could not have it be- 
cause Pelias the Terrible held it in his grip. 

At last Jason decided that he would try to win back 
the land for himself. As he went forth wise old Cheiron 
said to him, ^ 'Jason, promise me two things before 
you go." 

"I will promise," said Jason. 

"Speak harshly to no soul whom you may meet, and 
stand by the word which you shall speak." 

So Jason strode down the mountain-side into the 
world of adventure. He soon learned at the court of 
Pelias that he could only gain his kingdom if he brought 
back from a far country the Fleece of the Golden Kam 
that had carried off on its back Pelias' own children. 

So Jason's heralds went far and wide, and cried 
out : 

''Who dare come on the adventure of the Golden 
Fleece ?" 

In answer to the challenge there came Hercules the 
Mighty, with his lion's skin on his back and his knotted 
club in his hand; wise Mopsus, who knew the speech 
of birds; Argus, the most skillful of the builders of 
ships; Tiphys, the unrivalled steersman; Idmon, who 
could foretell things to come ; and other splendid heroes. 
They were indeed, with Jason, a glorious company of 
old school-fellows, who had been trained to great deeds 
by the wise centaur, Cheiron. 

The Fleece of the Golden Eam was nailed to a tree 
far, far away across the Euxine Sea ^ near the Caucasus 
»The Black Sea. 



PROLOGUE 19 

Mountains. To secure it they must not only encounter 
many and great dangers, but they must also sail farther 
than men had ever dared to venture on the dark waters. 

So the heroes with their axes felled the giant pines 
on Mount Pelion and with the timber they built, to 
the designs of the craftsman Argus, the first long ship 
that ever dared the greater seas. Fifty oars she had — 
one for every hero. And they gave to the good ship the 
name of Argo in honour of Argus, who designed her. 
The crew were, therefore, called the Argo-sailors — or, 
as we say, the Argonauts. 

When she was built, however, she was too heavy for 
the heroes to launch. So Orpheus, the sweetest of all 
singers, played upon his harp and sang a song of 
magical power. 

"How sweet it is," he sang, "to ride upon the surges, 
and to leap from wave to wave, while the wind sings 
cheerful in the cordage, and the oars flash fast among 
the foam! How sweet it is to roam across the ocean, 
and see new cities and wondrous lands, and to come 
home laden with treasure, and to win undying fame!'' 

As the ship Argo heard the words — the story tells 
lis — a great longing came upon her to breast the waves 
and scatter the spray from her gleaming bows; so she 
surged forward from the sand to the rollers, and plunged 
swiftly into the waiting sea. 

For years upon years the Argonauts sailed the seas 
and took what adventure came their way. Tempests 
drove them into unknown oceans ; the sun scorched them 
and tanned their faces; the Sirens sought to lure them 
to death by their songs ; the icy blasts of the north froze 
them; enemies plotted and fought against them; but 



20 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

nothing could turn them back or strike any fear into 
their stout hearts. 

At last Jason and his fellow Argonauts fought and 
ploughed their way through the perils that surrounded 
the Golden Fleece. By the help of the witch-maiden 
Medea and the golden-singer Orpheus, Jason overcame 
all dangers and tore the Golden Fleece from its tree. 

Seizing the Fleece, he went aboard the Argo in 
triumph, and, at length, after so many adventures that 
a big book might be filled with the story of them, he 
at last came back and won his kingdom and reigned 
there. Always in his course Jason had remembered 
his promises to Cheiron that he would not speak harshly 
and that he would stand by his words. And because 
of this kindness and loyalty, even more than by his 
strength and skill, he had triumphed. 



This tale of the Argonauts of ancient Greece speaks 
of heroes long ago in the dim dawn of history. But 
it is a story that we always like to hear, because some- 
thing in us thrills (as the timbers of the Argo herself 
did) to the Orpheus song of adventure in quest of some 
good prize that is hard to gain. 

All through the story of man we find brave Argonauts 
launching into strange seas: some are Vikings seeking 
battle and booty ; some, like Prince Henry the Naviga- 
tor and Columbus, Cabot and Captain Cook, search 
for new lands across uncharted oceans: others, like 
Damien and John Williams and Livingstone, sail 
away and penetrate untrodden places, not to bring away 
treasure, but to carry the Treasure of Life to other 
men; — they go, I say, for differing reasons, but they 



PROLOGUE 21 

all are ready to risk everything and to take what ad- 
venture may befall them. 

Three centuries ago a ship sailed out of England into 
the unknown, with a company of Argonauts — not men 
only, but women also, with boys and girls. They went 
out across the Atlantic Ocean in a little ship of only a 
hundred and eighty tons, in the Quest — not of a Golden 
Fleece — but of Liberty. What they sought in America, 
they — after adventures with Eed Indians and many 
hard knocks — found at last. And the freedom that 
they found they afterwards fought for in America, the 
land that had now become their own; they have now 
helped to win freedom for the world of our day, if that 
world will only share their heroic spirit and risk all 
else to keep that pearl of great price. 

In these chapters that follow boys and girls are going 
to listen to the story of those hero-Argonauts who lived 
in England when Elizabeth was Queen, and, having 
striven for freedom in their own land till after James I 
was on the throne, voyaged across strange waters to the 
lands of the Ked Men and made a New England in 
the West 



CHAPTER I 
ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 



THE DANGEKOUS WAY OF THE PILGRIMS 

Valiant-f or- Truth : The most dangerous way in the world, 
said they, is that which the pilgrims go. 

Greatheart: Did they show you wherein this way is so 
dangerous ? 

Valiant : Yes, and that in many particulars. 

Greatheart: Name some of them. 

Valiant: They told me of the Slough of Despond, where 
Christian was well-nigh smothered. They told me that there 
were archers standing ready in Beelzebub Castle, to shoot 
them who should knock at the Wicket-gate for entrance. 
They told me also of the wood and dark mountains; of the 
Hill Difficulty; of the lions; and also of the three giants, 
Eloody-man, JViaul, and Slaygood. They said, moreover, that 
there was a foul fiend haunted the Valley of Humiliation; 
and that Christian was by him almost bereft of life. Besides, 
said they, you must go over the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death, where the hobgoblins are, where the light is dark- 
ness, where the way is full of snares, pits, traps, and gins. 
They told me also of Giant Despair, of Doubting Castle, 
and of the ruin that the pilgrims had met with here. Fur- 
ther, they said I must go over the Enchanted Ground, which 
was dangerous ; and that after all this, I should find a river, 
over which there was no bridge; and that that river did lie 
betwixt me and the Celestial Country. 

Greatheart : And did none of these things discourage you ? 
Valiant; No; they seemed but as so many nothings to 
me, 

BuNYAN, The Pilgrim's Progress. 



chapter i 
o:n' the great :n^orth road 



The iron gate of a dungeon in London swung back on 
its creaking hinges in the last night of March in 1593, 
in the black hour before dawn. The flickering light of 
a candle-lanthom fell on two men, who lay chained on 
the damp floor. Their names were Barrowe and 
Greenwood. 

The warders ordered the men to rise. They brought 
them out of their dungeon. Then with hammer and 
chisel they struck off the iron shackles that bound the 
captives. The gate of the Fleet Prison swung open. 
Barrowe and Greenwood were led out. 

The uneasy waters of the Thames tide, running in 
the narrow channels of the Fleet River between Fleet 
Street and Ludgate Hill, lapped against the prison 
walls. ^ The breeze of a chill spring morning caught 
the men as they mounted a cart that stood in the nar- 
row road that led up from the river to Holbom. As 
the cart lurched up to Holborn the first grey light of 
dawn showed against the eastern sky the soaring spire 
of old St. Paufs Cathedral. 

*The water of the Fleet stream runs now in a culvert under 
Farringdon Street, and enters the Thames under the first arch on 
the north side of Blackfriars Bridge. The opening can be seen 
at low tide. The Fleet Prison site is now covered by the 
Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street. 

25 



26 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Barrowe and Greenwood knew what was happening. 
They were going out, not to freedom, but to die. They 
had, only eight days earlier, been tried in the Old 
Bailey; and they had been convicted and sentenced to 
death. 

Some strayed reveller, as he saw the well-known 
prisoner's cart rolling along Holbom westward to the 
place of execution might wonder what crime these 
felons had committed to bring them to the scaffold. 
Their crime was that they had written and published 
books, arguing that a man ought to be free to worship 
God in the way that seemed right to him. They held 
that the Army of Jesus Christ (that is. His Church) 
was made up of men and women who had enlisted freely 
to serve Him ; and that the Church was not and could 
not be an Army of Conscripts of all kinds of folk 
ordered to go to worship. For such a Church included 
thieves and murderers, and every sort of evil man and 
woman. They said that Jesus Christ alone was the true 
Head of the Church, and not Queen Elizabeth or any 
governor, and that the people who really did worship 
Jesus Christ and desired to live pure lives should 
separate themselves into a Church. For thus "devising 
seditious books," as the judge called it, and for actually 
meeting for worship in private houses with other men 
who believed the same things, they were solemnly tried 
and condemned to death. 

Barrowe and Greenwood, as they went to the gallows 
and looked back at the spire of old St. Paul's, may well 
have remembered for their comfort that St. Paul him- 
self, in his day, had been throAvn into prison and 
chained and beaten, and had at last been executed at 



ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 27 

Rome, because he preached that Jesus Christ was high 
above all principalities and powers. 

At last the lumbering cart brought them to the place 
of execution called Tyburn.^ The gallows on the 
scaffold stood up gaunt and horrible. A crowd had 
gathered about the foot of the scaffold — some out of 
curiosity; others because they sympathised with Bar- 
rowe and Greenwood. A noose of rope was placed 
about the neck of each of the prisoners. They spoke a 
few words of cheer and farewell to their friends about 
them. The order for execution was about to be given. 

Suddenly came a shout and the sound of horses' hoofs 
on the road. The crowd divided. 

"A messenger from the Queen," the cry went up. 
Then "A reprieve! A reprieve!" 

The crowd cheered and rejoiced as they saw Bar- 
rowe and Greenwood brought from the scaffold. The 
news spread like wildfire. As they were taken back 
in the cart to the prison, people leaned out from the 
windows of the houses and cheered, and the crowds 
hurried from the roadway. 

Queen Elizabeth's messenger, however, had only 
brought a reprieve, and not a pardon. Barrowe and 
Greenwood were not set free; they were simply sent 
back to prison in the dark cell. Within a week ^ they 
were again taken out from the dungeon and put on the 
cart and carried to Tyburn once more — and for the last 
time. No messenger came bringing reprieve to the 
foot of the gallows. They died as true martyrs to win 
freedom for all of us who have come after them. 

* Where the Marble Arch now stands at the north-east comer of 
Hyde Park. 

* April 6th, 1593. 



28 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 



II 

In those times Royal Messengers rode every day up 
the Great l^orth Road from London to Scotland, bear- 
ing the King's orders in their saddle-bags, and carrying 
on their lips the news of the doings in London town. 

The Messengers rode on horseback from^ London 
northward from one post-house to another. In the 
summer they must travel at seven miles an hour; in 
the winter they were not expected to do more than ^Ye 
because of the snow and mud. Post-houses were fixed 
at intervals of a number of miles apart all along four 
great roads from London — one by the Great North 
Road to Scotland, one to Ireland by Beaumaris, one to 
Europe by Dover, and one to Plymouth, i.e. to the 
Royal Dockyard. 

There were two horses kept at every post-house for 
the Messengers. A man would ride a horse from one 
post-house to another (say Doncaster to Scrooby) and 
then take a fresh horse from Scrooby towards London. 
The next Messenger going northward would ride the 
Doncaster horse back from Scrooby to his stable at 
Doncaster. From his saddle swung two leather saddle- 
bags lined with baize to carry his letters dry and safe, 
and over his shoulder hung a horn which he blew three 
or four times a mile, and as often as he met any other 
traveller on the road. 

So the Messenger going north up the Great North 
Road early in April 1593, would be full of the story 
of how two brave men, Barrowe and Greenwood, had 
been executed on the gallows at Tyburn that very morn- 



ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 29 

ing. As he rode out of London up the northern heights 
he would tell his story at post-house after post-house 
as the ostlers changed the horses and he took his flagon 
of ale. 

The road all the way was rough, as all roads were 
in England in those days. They were covered with deep 
mud in that early spring weather. No coaches or 
wagons could go on the road without the wheels sink- 
ing into the mire almost to the axle-trees. A man on 
horseback had to pick his way carefully. 

At last, however, after travelling for days, the Mes^ 
senger would be glad to see ahead of him one of the best 
post-houses in all England. Splashing through the ford 
of the stream below the water-mill, with the clump of 
fir-trees showing against the evening sky, and the fresh 
yellow of the early gorse-blossoms reflecting the after- 
glow, the messenger would trot his horse into the village 
of Scrooby. He would pass the Church among its 
dark trees, the cottages with the blue smoke of wood- 
fires curling from the chimneys, the cows lurching along 
the lanes to the milking, the plentiful rabbits scuttling 
back to the warren as the messenger sounded his horn 
and startled them at their evening feeding, the shout- 
ing group of boys playing "touch'' on the green. 

All these he would pass without taking much notice 
of them. But his eyes would lighten with pleasure as 
he saw the great comfortable roof and massive timbers 
of the Manor House of Scrooby standing alone within 
the circle of its dark moat filled with water; yet with 
its windows gleaming at him, and the heavy old door 
thrown open on its sturdy hinges to welcome him as he 
crossed the drawbridge. 



30 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 



III 

In the doorway at the top of the stone steps of 
Scrooby Manor ^ stood a young man of between twenty- 
six and twenty-seven years of age. The Messenger 
would know him well. For William Brewster was the 
King's Master of the Post at Scrooby Manor, as his 
father and grandfather had been before him. He was 
responsible for taking care of the horses that carried the 
Post-Messengers on their backs. 

The Messenger, as he went up the steps, would pull 
from his bag the book in which were written down the 
times when he had reached the post-houses all along 
the road. William Brewster would then get his quill 
and ink-horn and write down in the Post Book the time 
at which the messenger had arrived. 

William loved the old Manor House, for he had 
grown up under its great timbered roof. He had played 
on its lawns and by its moat. He had fished as a boy 
in the river Idle near by. He had seen great knights 
and fair ladies from the Court of the Queen ride over 
the bridge to sleep in the Manor House; and anxious 
Secretaries of State, battered soldiers and travel- 
stained pedlars^ — for people of all degrees stopped at 
the post-house as they journeyed north or south on the 
Great North Eoad. 

William Brewster, indeed, thirteen years earlier, 

* "Scrooby Manor House," said Leland the Antiquary, who was 
there in 1541, "is builded in two courts, whereof the first is very 
ample and all builded of timber, saving the front of the house 
that is of brick, to the which ascenditur per gradus lapideos. 
The inner court building . . . was of timber and waa not in 
compaes past the fourth part of the outer court." 



ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 31 

when lie was a boy, had left the old Manor House, and 
had gone south-eastward across the fen-land — perhaps 
by barge on the river, perhaps by pony on road and 
path — probably by both — till his eyes saw the pinnacles 
and towers of the wonderful University of Cambridga 
He had lived there as a student in the oldest of all the 
colleges at Cambridge — Peterhouse. He had matricu- 
lated there as a student — though he was only a fourteen- 
year-old boy — on December 3rd, 1580. The brave John 
Greenwood (who was hanged at Tyburn with Barrowe) 
was, when William Brewster entered Peterhouse, still 
a student at Corpus Christi. And William Brewster at 
Cambridge drank in those same ideas of liberty that 
John Greenwood had. There was another young stu- 
dent at Cambridge at the very same time named John 
Robinson, who, we may be sure, knew John Greenwood 
and William Brewster. We shall hear more about John 
Robinson later on. 

Stranger things than this experience at Cambridge, 
however, had happened to William. For when he was 
only about seventeen years old (probably when he was 
home from Cambridge at the Manor House at Scrooby 
for the vacation) a great Secretary of State, who was 
in the service of Queen Elizabeth, came to stay at the 
Manor. 

His name was William Davison. He took a liking 
to the young Cambridge student, William Brewster, and 
asked him if he would like to enter his service. So 
William Brewster, without waiting to take his degree 
at Cambridge, agreed to be Davison's helper, and rode 
with his new master all up the Great North Road to 
London to the court of Queen Elizabeth. Then they 
sailed across the N'orth Sea to busy Antwerp in the 



32 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Netherlands, where Davison was the Queen's am- 
bassador; and young William saw ships and strange 
sailors from all the countries of the wide world, and 
would meet men from far lands like Spain and Italy, 
and even from Constantinople and India. 

In Antwerp, William Davison and William Brewster 
went together to the Puritan English Church. It was 
in that Church and in talk with Davison that William 
Brewster grew to follow the great Quest of Liberty that 
he had first seen at Cambridge when he was about 
sixteen years old. 

Young Brewster found great favour in his master's 
eyes. Davison thought AVilliam ''so discreete and faith- 
full as he trusted him above all others that were aboute 
him, and only employed him in all matters of greatest 
trust and secrecie; he esteemed him rather as a sonne 
than a servante; and for his wisdom and godliness he 
would converse with him, more like a friend and 
familier, than a maister." He even gave William 
Brewster a gold chain of honour that he was to wear 
when they came home all the time as they rode through 
England. 

William Davison, however (like poor Sir Walter 
Raleigh, who had risked his life a hundred times for 
England, but was cast into prison by Elizabeth), fell 
under the gTeat Queen's displeasure, and was thrown 
out of office. So William Brewster lost his master and 
went riding back along the Great North Road to 
Scrooby Manor, where at last in 1590 he was made 
Postmaster when he was still only twenty-three. 

He had been Master of the Posts at Scrooby for three 
years when the Messenger came that evening trotting 
on horseback over the bridge to the gates of the Manor 



ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 33 

House with the news of the execution of brave Barrowe 
and that Greatheart Greenwood. 

As the Messenger sat eating his supper in Scrooby 
Manor that night in April 1593, by the flickering 
candle-light, he would be able to tell William Brewster, 
the Postmaster, all the news of London. 

We can well believe that William would be stirred 
to anger and to sorrow when he heard that young John 
Greenwood (who had only left Cambridge two years be- 
fore he himself did) had been foully hanged as though 
he were a criminal, simply because he had wished to 
worship God freely in the company of like-minded men. 
It may be, too, that William's young face looked stern 
and almost grim as he wondered whether he himself 
would some day have to face the scaffold. For his mind 
was beginning strongly to have thoughts like those that 
had brought Barrowe and Greenwood to their deaths 
at Tyburn. 

The Messenger went to his bed; and in the morn- 
ing William Brewster wrote in the Post Book the hour 
of his starting. The horse came round, and the post- 
rider trotted away. William Brewster was left with his 
thoughts. 

The years went on; and news came continually by 
traveller and Post-Messenger to the Manor House on 
the Great North Eoad. A baby who was bom in a village 
called Austerfield — only three miles from William 
Brewster's home at the Manor — ^began to grow into a 
boy who loved to be with William Brewster. This 
Austerfield boy's name was William Bradford. 

Together on a Sunday morning the two Williams, 



34 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

boy and man, would walk twelve miles past Scraftworth, 
Everton, and Gringley-on-the-Hill down to the ferry- 
boat that took them across the Trent towards Gains^ 
borough. 

They walked all that way to hear the preaching of 
a good man named John Smyth — a man who was so 
kind-hearted that he would give up his cloak to be cut 
up and made into clothes for some man who was too 
poor to buy any for himself to keep out the cold. John 
Smyth in Gainsborough was doing just what Barrowe 
and Greenwood had been killed for: he wrote Looks to 
defend liberty to worship God in separate gatherings, 
and he himself was minister to such a separate Church 
in Gainsborough. 

At last there were so many people going from the 
villages round Scrooby to Gainsborough on Sundays 
that they felt it was unnecessary to walk every week 
so far across the country to Gainsborough. They could 
form a little Church themselves. They believed that 
if two or three were gathered together in Christ's name 
to worship Him there was the Church. So William 
Brewster, about the year 1600, asked the friends to 
come and meet under his roof at the Manor House at 
Scrooby. 

This was very brave of Brewster; for Archbishop 
Whitgift was driving to prison men who dared to wor- 
ship in this way. At any hour he might find himself 
robbed of his home and his living, and carried away to 
a dungeon and even a scaffold. But that did not stop 
him. 

Their leader was a fine old white-bearded prophet- 
preacher named Richard Clyfton. He was helped by 
the young Cambridge man — who (you remember) was 



ON THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 35 

about William Brewster's age — ^named John Kobinson. 
As a young clerg)Tnan in Norwich, Robinson had al- 
ready been thrown into prison for gathering people in 
worship and for declaring their freedom to meet as 
they desired. 

So on a Sunday morning the men and women came 
with their boys and girls from the farmsteads and the 
villages round about to the Manor House. We do not 
know whether they held their service in the big hall 
of the Manor, with its heavy timbered roof, great open 
fireplace, and cavernous chimney. It is more likely 
that they worshipped in the cosy barn, with its warm, 
thatched roof, its dim, cobwebby great beams and its 
piles of straw and hay and sacks of com. Sometimes, 
maybe, they worshipped in the stable, where the words 
of the prayers would mix with the sound of the post- 
horses eating their com. 

Sometimes they had warning that the Queen's officers 
would arrest them if they worshipped there. That week 
they would arrange secretly to meet in some other place 
close by in another village. But in one place or an- 
other they did meet, in spite of everything. 

It was strange to know, while you were singing a 
Psalm or hearing a lesson read, that before it was ended, 
you might be made a prisoner ; or that, when you lifted 
your head from prayer, you might see the muskets of 
soldiers at the open door, pointed at you, and hear the 
clank of the shackles that were to be rivetted on your 
wrists and ankles. 



CHAPTEE II 
THE STOEMY PASSAGE 



OUTWAED BOFND 

Dear Earth, near Earth, the clay that made us man. 
The land we sowed. 
The hearth that glowed — 

O mother, must we bid farewell to thee? 
Fast dawns the last dawn, and what shall comfort then 
The lonely hearts that roam the outer sea? 

Gray wakes the daybreak, the shivering sails are set, 
To misty deeps 
The channel sweeps — 

O mother, think on us who think on thee I 
Earth-home, birth-home, with love remember yet 
The sons in exile on the eternal sea. 

Sir Henry Newbolt. 
By permission of the author. 



CHAPTER II 
THE STOEMY PASSAGE 



William Brewster and John Eobinson and their 
friends in Scrooby and the country round about were 
at last forced to see very clearly that they could not 
stay in England any longer. If they did remain, they 
knew that they would be hunted from pillar to post, 
and, at the worst, die of fever in some dark dungeon 
in those foul gaols, like the Fleet or Brideswell or in 
the foetid cells of Boston Prison. 

The boy, William Bradford, who was now seventeen 
years old, in a book that he wrote later, told how they 
were ^'hunted and persecuted on every side; so as their 
former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison 
of these which now came upon them. For some were 
taken and clapt up in prison, others had their houses 
besett and watcht night and day, and hardly escaped 
their hands, and ye most were faine to flie and leave 
their houses and habitations and the means of their 
livelehood.'' 

They were driven at last in 1607 to leave the home- 
steads where they had been born; the old meadow by 
the river Idle, where they had played and fished; the 
smithy where their fathers' and grandfathers' and great- 
grandfathers' horses had been shod. They must sail 

39 



40 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

into a strange land ; and they would never see the wild- 
duck flv over their native meadows again. 
As William Bradford said: 

"To goe into a countrie they knew not (but by hear- 
say), wher they must learne a new language, and get 
their livings they knew not how, it being a dear place 
and subjecte to ye misseries of warr, it was by many 
thought an adventure almost desperate, a case in- 
tolerable, and a misserie worse than death." 

They hated to go; for they loved England, though 
they felt that her government treated them harshly. 
Indeed the boys who lived then loved England as peo- 
ple had never done in all her history. For at last she 
had become really one land and one people. She had 
passed through terrible perils. A boy — like William 
Bradford — ^would listen at night by the fire in the 
Manor House at Scrooby, with his chin in his hands, 
while he was told the story of how, only two years 
before he himself was born, the Great Armada of Spain 
had sailed to destroy England, and how Drake had 
"drummed them down the Channel." 

Fancy hearing the story of the great victory over 
the Armada from the very lips of a sailor who had 
fought in the greatest naval battle! The boy might 
even possibly have read Sir Walter Raleigh's book 
The Fight About the Azores and his Discoveries, and 
perhaps Hakluyt's wonderful Voyages and Discoveries, 
of which the last volume had only been published seven 
years earlier in 1600. And only a few years before 
that there had come into print for the first time those 
words of the love of England written by a man William 



THE STORMY PASSAGE 41 

Shakespeare, who in those very days walked the streets 
of London Town — ^words that have set the blood of 
three centuries of boyhood in a tingle. 

. . . This little world, 
This precious stone set in the silver sea. 
Which serves it in the office of a wall. 
Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
Against the envy of less happier lands; 
This blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England.^ 

These men did love their own land which had so 
narrowly escaped with its life from the Armada of 
Spain. Yet England tried their love sorely and wore 
out their patience. They were men who knew that 
"patriotism is not enough"; — they had gone to prison 
for disobeying the law of their country in obedience to 
what was — they were sure in their own minds — a still 
higher law. They could say to England what the sol- 
dier-poet said to his lady-love: 

"I could not love thee. Dear, so much. 
Loved I not Honour more." ^ 

So they sat by the chimney-comer in the Manor at 
Scrooby talking of how they must leave England. 

They thought of only one land where they might find 
freedom, the land that we call Holland, which was then 
usually named the ^Netherlands, or the Low Country. 
Many of the Dutchmen from Holland in those days 
came across the seas to England on business. Some 
of them actually lived not far off in IsTorwich, where 

^King Richard II, Act II, Sc. I, published 1597, nine years 
after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. 

''Eichard Lovelace, To Lucasta, on going to the Wars. 



42 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

you could hear the "'click-clump, clickety-clump" of 
the looms at which they worked at the worsted-making. 

Other of the Dutch countrymen would come from 
time to time to the Post-house at the Manor of Scrooby 
on the Great North Eoad. They told of the freedom 
of their native land of Holland, where^ — they said — 
in spite of the threats of the Spanish king, they held 
freely opinions like those for which their friends in 
England were thrown into prison and persecuted in 
other ways. William Brewster the young Postmaster, 
who (as we know) had lived in Holland himself for 
years, would nod his head in agreement with what they 
said. 

In such talks as these the Pilgrims began to think 
of sailing over the seas to the freedom of Holland to 
escape from the tyranny of the rule of England. 

How could they escape? The King's officers locked 
them up in prison in England for disobeying the law; 
yet they would not let them leave the land. No one 
could sail away from England without a licence from 
old Lord Treasurer Burghley. And he refused to give 
licences to the Pilgrims. So, if they went at all, they 
must by hook or crook go in stealth by secret ways, like 
smugglers. 

If they decided to run the gauntlet and try to escape, 
how were they even to reach the coast ? There were no 
good roads ; indeed only a few rough tracks crossed the 
land, and even the tracks were sloughs of mud in wet 
weather. And, of all places in England in that day, the 
flat land of the undrained fens of Norfolk and Lincoln- 
shire was the most desperately hard to cross. 

There were shaky paths across bottomless morasses 
and over quaking bogs. 



THE STORMY PASSAGE 43 

To be caught in the darkness of night on one of the 
narrower paths across that land was to have little chance 
of seeing the morning alive, save by remaining quite 
still through the cold and wet of the long black hours. 
For a single footstep might throw a man into the 
horrible, dragging, choking slime against which not 
even a Hercules could fight. So evil were the paths 
that, in those days, on the old tower of the church at 
Boston every night a great lantern was lighted so that 
its beams across the fens might by chance lead the 
feet of some lost travellers from the bogs to the firm 
streets of the town. 

In spite of perils of King's officers and of bogs and 
fens, however, they decided to go to Holland — pilgrims 
in search of freedom. 

II 

We do not know by what ways many of them ever 
reached the coast, or, having reached it, were able to 
sail to Holland. Here are two stories, however, of the 
perilous journeys of the parties of Pilgrims, told by 
young William Bradford, who was in the adventures. 

Some of the Pilgrims went by stealth down to the 
coast. They secretly arranged with the British captain 
of a ship to take them aboard under cover of the dark- 
ness, and to sail with them across the J^orth Sea to 
Holland. All went well till they reached the sea. Then 
they rowed out in boats and climbed aboard the ship. 
They soon stowed themselves away below deck, and 
waited, expecting to hear the anchor weighed and the 
sails hoisted. But no such thing happened. 

They heard instead the "clunk" of oars ; men climbed 



m THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

aboard. There were tlie voices of these men on deck. 

"Who are they?'' questioned the Pilgrims. 

They were not to stay long in doubt. The dastardly 
captain, having taken their money to convey them to 
Holland, had betrayed them to the King's officers, who 
were now on board. The officers ordered the Pilgrims 
on deck, drove them — men, women, and children — into 
open boats, rowed them back to the coast and cast them 
into prison in Boston, where they were brought before 
the magistrates, and finally sent back to their homes in 
the depth of one of the most dreadful winters of snow 
and ice that England has ever known. 

Their desperate attempt had failed; but they were 
not daunted. 

There's no discouragement 
Shall make him once relent 
His first avowed intent 
To be a pilgrim.^ 

'NesiT by Scrooby ran (you remember) the sluggish 
river Idle, a shallow and slow stream. Down the river 
went flat-bottomed boats, half-punt, half-barge. The 
women and the children were put aboard some of these 
boats, and with them were the packages holding their 
clothes and the clothes of the men, together with the 
things they valued. They steered slowly down the lazy 
stream till the Idle ran smoothly into the broader waters 
of the Trent. This bit of country is where King Canute 
used to live, and they say that it was on the bank of this 
tidal river that the King's courtiers urged him to com- 
mand the tide to stop. King James in these very days 

* John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. 



THE STORMY PASSAGE 45 

was trying to stop the tide of freedom from flowing in 
the world. We shall see how his attempt fared. 

On the Trent there waited for them a little sailing 
barque. In secret and quietly men carried the baskets 
of food, casks of water, and other goods and stowed 
them into this little ship. Then the women and the 
children came an:l walked timidly across the plank into 
the boat. Some of tha boys and girls went aboard with 
eyes sparkling at this strai^ge new adventure of travel- 
ling across the seas. But some of the younger ones 
were rather frightened, and stared about them with 
eyes wide open. One or two babies lay happily asleep 
on their mothers' breasts. The mothers were brave, but 
very sad. For they were leaving their little homes be- 
hind them and the land that they loved, and were going 
out over the sea into a strange world among people of 
quite other ways than theirs. 

Two or three sailors came aboard. There was the 
creaking of the pulleys as they hauled on the ropes and 
hoisted the sail, which filled to the wind. The little 
barque slowly gathered way, tacking down the river 
Trent till she at last went dipping and bobbing out into 
the sea. 

The Pilgrims had planned that this barque should sail 
with the women and children and with the goods to ', 
rendezvous off a lonely bit of coast between Grimsby 
and Hull, where a Dutch shipmaster from Hull had 
promised to meet them with his large sea-going ship. 

The men, meanwhile, did not go in this little barque 
to meet the big ship, but walked all across the land 
from Scrooby and the other places out to a wild heath 
between Grimsby and Hull, overlooking the sea. They 
knew that if they had all gone aboard the little barges 



46 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

and travelled down the Idle to the barque on the Trent, 
they would have been suspected of flight, and would 
have been captured and thrown into prison. It was 
arranged that when the Dutch ship hove in sight and 
took the women and children aboard, the men would 
come down to the beach, and put off in boats to join 
the women and children on the ship. 

The little barque with its cargo of women and chil- 
dren sailed bravely to the place of meeting. The Dutch 
ship was not there. The wind rose and began to moan 
through the rigging of the barque. The sea grew rough, 
and the rolling waves pitched the boat up and down 
and tossed her about till the boys and girls who had 
looked forward to the adventure were very sea-sick 
indeed. 

The women could not endure the agonies of sickness 
in the boat. 

"Can you not run her back into that creek?'' they 
asked the seamen. "We should be quiet there and 
hidden, and could get over our sickness." 

So the good-hearted sailors turned her about and 
ran for the creek, where the barque lay aground at 
low water. There they stayed through the hours of the 
night, some sleeping, some waking, but all cold in the 
sharp night-air of the early spring-time. At last the 
first touches of cold, grey, morning light across the sea 
began to break the power of the darkness. 

The sharp wind from the eastern seas drove wisps 
of cloud over the high common on that spring morn- 
ing. On the moorland the cold breeze caught the group 
of men who were waiting there looking anxiously out 
to sea. Under their frowning brows they looked out to 
the grey dawn that came cheerlessly over the ocean. 



THE STORMY PASSAGE 47 

"When will the ship come ? Will the Dutchman be- 
tray us as the English captain did? Will the King's 
oflScers come and find us and take us to prison before 
we can get away ?" 

These were the questions the men would ask one an- 
other as they stood there waiting, waiting. 

"The Dutch captain said we were not to fear," one 
might reply. "He said that he would do for us what 
we wished." 

"Yes," another would answer, "but that is what the 
English captain said; yet he betrayed our people, and 
they were made a sight and a shame in the eyes of all 
Boston, and were brought before the magistrates. The 
Dutch ship was to be here yesterday ; and now the night 
has gone and here is another dawn, but still she is not 
here." 

"Sail ho !" cried a third, and, sure enough, from the 
Hull direction came the sight of the square-rigged 
Dutch ship that they expected. They signalled to her 
and a boat was let down to fetch off the men. But to 
their dismay the women in the barque could not move. 
She was stuck fast in the mud at low tide. The water 
would not be full enough in the creek to get them off 
till noon. They knew that every minute lost was full 
of danger that iJiey could be caught ; yet they were help- 
less. 

The Dutch ship-master sent off his boat to the shore, 
and as many of the men as the boat would hold crowded 
into her, and with all speed pulled for the ship. They 
reached her and climbed aboard. 

The boat was putting off again, when suddenly the 
ship-master swore a round oath, and ordered her to stop. 
He pointed ashore. The men, looking, saw horses 



48 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

galloping toward the shore. A whole company of armed 
men, horse and foot, were hurrying up. The country- 
side was roused. 

It was the old story all over again. The Govern- 
ment of England would not let the people stay in peace 
in their own land to worship God as they desired, and 
yet would not let them leave their land to worship ac- 
cording to their own conscience in other lands. 

The ship-master — as William Bradford, who was on 
board, tells us — "swore his countries oath ^Sacramente V 
— and having ye wind f aire, waighed his ancor, hoysed 
sayles and away !'^ 

III 

We must leave them for a while and ask what hap- 
pened to the women who could not be rescued and were 
left behind in the barque stranded on the mud. 

"Pitifull it was [wrote William Bradford] to see 
ye heavie case of these poore women in this distress; 
what weeping and crying on every side, some for their 
husbands, that were carried away in ye ship as is be- 
fore related; others not knowing what should become 
of them, and their little ones; others again melted in 
teares, seeing their poore little ones hanging aboute 
them, crying for feare, and quaking with could." ^ 

The children cried as the rough soldiers came riding 

and running on foot down to the creek, to take them 

prisoners. Some of the men who had been left on the 

shore when the boatload escaped dashed off in flight 

*All the quotations from William Bradford are from his His- 
tory of Plymouth Plantation, 



THE STORMY PASSAGE 49 

across the moor and escaped. The prisoners were 
hurried to Hull and Grimsby and other places. 

^N'obody knew what to do with the prisoners, even 
now that they had captured them. They had sold their 
homes; they had given up their trades. The cost of 
keeping the people in a prison was charged on the rates 
of the town where they were. So nobody wished to have 
them in their jails. The constables got dead tired of 
moving the prisoners about from place to place; the 
captives, too, were quite worn out. At last it was de- 
cided to let them go out of England across the seas to 
Holland — not through any feeling of mercy for them, 
but simply because the magistrates found themselves in 
a position where they simply could do nothing else. 

So the Pilgrim-exiles went aboard ship, — the men 
who had been captured, the mothers and their boys and 
girls. They sailed away out of sight of the shores of 
England. For two hundred miles the slow sailing-ship 
butted her way across the North Sea day and night in 
sun and under cloud; in rain and gale till at last she 
came in sight of the long, flat, low Dutch coast. 

Then she turned and sailed along that coast for fifty 
miles till she came to the opening into the lagoons and 
winding narrow channels of the Zuyder Zee. Entering 
these channels, she crept along, tacking hither and 
thither by tedious ways, till she found the mouth of the 
River Y. Entering that river she went up on the tide 
till at last the roofs and spires and towers of the great 
city of Amsterdam came in sight, and with many shout- 
ings of the sailors the ship was moored safely by the 
wharf and the Pilgrims trooped across the gangway to 
dry land again. 

In Amsterdam they found the men who had escaped 



50 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

in the Dutch ship off the coast between Grimsby and 
Hull, and they heard the story of the voyage. William 
Bradford (you remember) was among these, and he 
would tell them of the horrors and adventures of that 
journey, much as he wrote them down in later years in 
his story of their adventures. 

"Ye poore men which were gott abord [he said] 
were in great distress for their wives and children, 
which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute 
of their helps ; and themselves also, not having a cloath 
to shifte them with, more then they had on their baks, 
and some scarce a peney aboute them, all they had 
being abord ye barke. It drew tears from their eyes, 
and anything they had they would have given to have 
been a shore againe; but all in vaine, ther was no 
remedy, they must thus sadly part." 

"The ship [he would tell them] sailed into the 
ocean. But a great storm came and smote us. Day and 
night the sky was covered with thick clouds. We did 
not see the sun, or the moon, or the stars for seven long 
days and nights. The storm raised a great sea, and we 
were tossed about terribly. At last we were driven right 
out of our course and found in front of us the cliffs and 
fiords of the coast of Norway. Even the hardy sailors 
on board were terrified at the greatness of the waves that 
swept over the ship. 

"But even then we did not lose faith. For when the 
waters of the waves that broke over the ship were run- 
ning into our mouths and ears, and the mariners cried 
out in their terror, 'We sink, we sink,' we cried out, 



THE STORMY PASSAGE 51 

'Yet, Lord, Thou canst save! Yet, Lord, Thou canst 
save.' 

^'And even as we cried the gale abated, the waves 
grew less terrible, the storm at last ceased, and we came 
into port all battered, with spars broken, sails torn, yet 
safe, to the astonishment of all who beheld us.'' 



CHAPTER III 
THE LAND OF THEEATENING WATERS 



WHO WOULD TRUE VALOUR SEE? 

Who would true valour see 

Let him come hither; 
One here will constant be. 

Come wind, come v» ?ather ; 
There's no discouragement 
Shall make him once relent 
His first avowed intent 

To be a pilgrim. 

Whoso beset him round 

With dismal stories. 
Do but themselves confound; 

His strength the more is. 
No lion can him fright. 
He'll with a giant fight. 
But he will have a right 

To be a pilgrim. 

Hobgoblin nor foul fiend 

Can daunt his spirit; 
He knows he at the end 

Shall life inherit. 
Then fancies fly away; 
He'll not fear what men say; 
He'll labour night and day 

To be a pilgrim. 

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. 



CHAPTER III 
THE LAND OF THREATEl^ING WATERS 



As the ship came to rest at the wharves of Amsterdam, 
the boys and girls, leaning against the bulwarks, gazed 
with wide-open eyes on such sights as they had never 
dreamed to exist. And their fathers and mothers were 
as full of wonder as the children. 

For nearly all the Pilgrims had lived in England in 
farm-houses or villages with wide lands stretching all 
around, where white sheep and red cows grazed and the 
corn yellowed in the sunshine. We can imagine, then, 
how full of wonder they were as they saw the busy 
docks of Amsterdam, with the sailors from England and 
France, from Italy, even Turkey and Africa, and from 
the fiords of Scandinavia, shouting and pulling at ropes 
and thumping great bales of wool and baulks of timber 
down on the wharves. Chattering in half the languages 
of Europe they bore on their backs jars of wine, bales 
of silk, and cases of spices, coffee, and tobacco. 

Still stranger, and more like a fairy-story to them, 
were the thick and high walls of the city with the sturdy 
towers pierced with narrow slit-openings through which 
the Dutch soldiers could shoot when their city was at- 
tacked; and on the walls were the men-at-arms on 
"sentry go" with hauberk and corselet, pike and musket. 

55 



56 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

When the ship was warped in to the dock the Pil- 
grims crossed the gangway and went in search of their 
friends who had gone before them. Going in under the 
shadows of the grim gateways through the thick walls, 
they came into streets more busy than any they had 
ever seen. Porters were carrying heavy sacks on their 
broad shoulders. Sturdy Dutch merchants in thick 
coats, knee-breeches, woollen stockings, and clumped 
shoes were bartering and bargaining with one another; 
while their brisk, clean, buxom wives, whose comely, 
rosy faces looked shrewdly out from under the spotless 
linen caps that framed them so neatly, were sitting at 
their stalls in the market-place selling cool slabs of 
fresh butter. 

They found their friends who had gone to Amster- 
dam before them ; and on Sunday they all met together 
for worship in the English Church of the Separatists 
there. Among the people in the Church at Aonsterdam 
there was one dear old widow who used to nurse any 
children who were ill. But when they were well again 
they used to take care how near to her they sat in 
church, for — William Bradford tells us — "She usually 
sat in a convenient place in the congregation with a 
little birchen rod in her hand, and kept little children 
in great awe from disturbing the congregation.'' 

The best and most wonderful thing of all, in the eyes 
of the Pilgrims, about Amsterdam and the other cities 
of Holland was not so much the strange sights that could 
be seen in the streets or on the city walls or on the 
wharves, but the spirit that was in the people. Most of 
all, the Pilgrims felt it as strange as it was good that 
the people there were ready to let them worship God 
in the way that they themselves believed to be best. 



THE LAND OF THREATENING WATERS 57 



II 

We may ask why there was this desire to have and 
to give freedom. There were many causes, but of these 
two were the greatest. These two causes of the love of 
liberty a boy or girl can well understand — they were 
the Sea and the Spaniard. 

The Sea has always looked as though it were going 
to swallow up the land of the Dutch people and drown 
it altogether. For Holland lies low, without protecting 
cliffs or any mountains. Many, many miles of it are 
indeed lower than the level of high tide. Only by build- 
ing and keeping strong, great dykes and making massive 
sea-gates to hold back the tides could she keep much of 
her land from being swallowed up in the sea, and re- 
claim still more that was once sea-marsh and fen. On 
that land, kept from the sea by the strong, protecting 
dykes and drained by the many canals that cut across 
it, were many sheep and cows and horses, with nice 
little farms and big windmills. 

If once the sea broke through those dykes, it would 
have rushed over all that land, drowned the cows, horses, 
and sheep, flowed over the clean, white, sanded floors of 
the farms, and ruined all the crops. The story that we 
learn about the boy — "the Hero of Haarlem" — ^who 
saved his country by holding his finger in the little hole 
in the dyke so that the water should not make a big 
hole and then break through, is a Dutch story of an ad- 
venture that happened to a boy between Amsterdam 
and Leyden. 

This very sea, however, held back by the dykes, 
brought into the harbours of the N'etherlands (like 



58 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Amsterdam) many ships from all places in the known 
world. The sea also led the Dutch to build more ships 
than indeed perhaps any country in the world of that 
day. You could see in Amsterdam, not only men of 
all the peoples of Europe, but of other races like African 
negroes. The great Rembrandt, when he lived there, 
painted an African in a picture. 

The Dutch sailors and merchants and their wives 
travelled in all the oceans in their ships. They knew 
the ways of other peoples away in the Indies of the 
East, on the coasts of Africa, in the ports of the 
Mediterranean Sea, on the cold shores of the Baltic, in 
Britain, in France, in Portugal and Spain and even 
on the wild shores of America. This made them broad- 
minded. Just as the harbours of Holland lay open to 
the flow of the sea, so her mind was open to the flow 
of new thoughts. 

The sturdy sailors of the Low Countries therefore 
knew and desired the freedom that they learned on the 
Seven Seas. But they hardly knew how much they 
loved this liberty till the Spanish galleons and armies 
tried to rob them of it. Not many years before the 
Pilgrims sailed to Amsterdam the arrogant galleons of 
the Spanish Armada had — as we know — come swooping 
up the Channel to destroy the strength and freedom 
of England. In the same way, but in a far worse de- 
gree, the ships and the armies of Spain had tried to 
hold the Dutch people in slavery. They had ruled them, 
indeed, with a rod of iron. When the Dutch desired 
to worship as they would, the power of Spain had tor- 
tured them with horrible thumbscrews, with the vile 
rack that dragged a living man's joints apart, with the 
iron boot, having nails in it that were driven right into 



THE LAND OF THREATENING WATERS 59 

a man's foot till lie fainted in agony. There is no 
more horrible story in the world than Alva's persecu- 
tion of the Dutch people for their religious inde- 
pendence. 

At last, however, the Dutch, by their courage and 
grim determination, had, for the time being, beaten off 
the rule of Spain. But they were still in dread of what 
the Spaniards would do. In that very spring when the 
English Pilgrims reached Amsterdam the States- 
General (as the Dutch Kepublic called itself) signed a 
Truce with the King of Spain (on April 9th, 1609) 
thus ending the Twenty-five Years' War. But it was 
only a truce — not a lasting peace. The very fact that 
they still might lose their freedom made them love it 
all the more; and it meant, too, that they would not 
deny that same freedom to any of the guests inside the 
walls of their cities. 

So the Sea and the Spaniard had together taught the 
men of the Netherlands the great lesson of freedom; 
and into the fresh air of that liberty our brave Pilgrims 
sailed. 

Ill 

In Amsterdam the Pilgrims had to face what young 
William Bradford called the "grime and grisly face of 
povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with 
whom they must bukle and encounter." For many 
reasons they thought that a better town in which to live 
would be the neighbouring curious and beautiful city 
of quiet streams called Leyden. 

One great reason why they decided to go to Leyden 
was that the people who had gone from England to 
Amsterdam before them, and had formed what they 



60 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

called tlie Ancient Separatist Churcli there, used to 
argue and even quarrel over trifling things that did not 
matter at all. For instance, thej divided into two 
quarrelling parties over the question whether the ephod 
that Aaron wore was green or sky blue ! The new Pil- 
grims wanted to be more peaceful than that, and more 
sensible. Their young pastor, John Robinson, was a 
man who hated quarrelling, though he would rather die 
than be a coward and surrender to what he knew was 
wrong. So he encouraged his Pilgrims to go away to 
Leyden. 

^Nevertheless, we ought not to laugh at the Ancient 
Separatist Church at Amsterdam. If they did squabble 
about Aaron's ephod, and if they were dreadfully upset 
because the pastor's wife wore a '^schowish hat topishly 
set," and a velvet hood, still they were brave men and 
women. As William Bradford said — and he knew them 
at Amsterdam — ^'They had few friends to comfort 
them, nor any arm of flesh to support them; and if in 
some things they were too rigid, they are rather to be 
pitied, considering their times and sufferings, than to be 
blasted with reproach to posterity." 

Having decided to go from Amsterdam to Leyden, 
how did the new Pilgrims travel? Boats went to and 
from Amsterdam and Leyden every day. So the Pil- 
grims would take places on some of those boats in the 
May of 1609. They would go along between the banks 
of the Haarlem Canal. The boys and girls in the boat 
could look across the flat fields, where the plump black- 
and-white Dutch cows grazed, to the farm-houses where 
their rich milk was made into the loveliest butter in 
the world. 

The boats came to a dam, where they were obliged 



THE LAND OF THREATENING WATERS 61 

to stop. All the people got out on to the bank and 
walked over the dam, while the boat was lifted right out 
and carried across. 

As the boys and girls stood there, they could see 
stretching out in front of them a great lake of shining 
water called Haarlem Meer.-^ The boat was floated on 
this lake, beyond which were the very dykes that the 
boy-hero of Haarlem saved by pushing his finger into 
the hole through which the sea was making its way. 
They clambered back into the boat, and for five miles no 
sound was heard, save the regular '^chunk" and thud 
of the oars or the cry of a wild-duck. 

At last the sun began to sink low in front of them. 
They saw against the evening glow the slowly revolv- 
ing arms of a giant windmill. They slid out of Haarlem 
Meer into the narrow waters of a canal, and from this 
into another, until at last they found themselves in the 
sluggish stream of the Old Rhine. 

In front of them rose the walls of the dream-city of 
Leyden, which was kept sweet and wholesome by the 
fresh waters of Haarlem Meer. 

This city, they could see, was different from any in 
the world though it was something like Venice. All 
round the strong broad walls ran the lazy stream of the 
Old Ehine. N"© one could go into the city at all except 
on those waters by boat or across them by bridge. On 
the south side of the city, and on the east side, great 
stalwart stone bastions of the wall pushed out into the 
stream, and on the bastions were sturdy sentinels and 
grim iron cannon. At two comers of the walls rose 
high, strong, round towers from the tops of which men 
could see across the fields and windmills to the dykes 
*See end papers. 



62 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

and to the open sea bj Delftshaven to the north. Here 
and there the waters of the Old Ehine ran through low 
bridges in the walls into the city itself. 

The barges with the Pilgrims in them passed through 
the water-gate under the walls into the city. They 
found that canals ran along between the houses some- 
what as they do in Venice. On the narrow roads be- 
tween the canals and the houses were tall, graceful 
poplar-trees with their leaves shivering in the cool 
breeze, strong limes giving shade on hot days, and wil- 
lows that leaned over to trail their slender fingers in 
the water of the streams. 

The Pilgrims, tired with their travel, were come to 
their journey's end. The barges were moored, and they 
stretched their cramped legs as they walked on the 
streets that were on the canal banks. So they went to 
the houses where they were to live, and were soon 
asleep. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE HOUSE WITH THE GREE:N" DOOB 



THE HOUSE BY THE WAY 

They drew near to a house which stood in the Way, which 
house was built for the relief of Pilgrims. . . . Christiana 
knocked, as she had done at the Gate before. Now when 
she had knocked, there came to the door a young damsel, 
and opened the door. . . . 

Then said the damsel to them, With whom would you speak 
in this place? Christiana answered, We understand that this 
is a privileged place for those that are become Pilgrims, and 
we now at this door are such; wherefore we pray that we 
may be partakers of that for which we at this time have 
come; for the day, as thou seest, is very far spent, and we 
are loth toinight to go any further. 

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. 



i 



CHAPTER IV 
THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 



The Pilgrims found much that was strange in the 
houses in Lejden. They were mostly strong and fair 
to look at, with clean windows and their doors and 
shutters nicely painted. Arched hrick passages led 
into bright courtyards and into gardens where tulips 
and daffodils and other flowers grew. 

In the kitchens the tables were scrubbed as clean 
as sand and water and brushes could make them; the 
floors were sprinkled with dry, white sand. The kitchen 
walls were covered with cool, clean, white tiles, having 
blue patterns on them. The tile-patterns were pfctures 
of windmills, ships, countrymen and women and plump 
Dutch boys and girls. 

In the gardens they could see the young Dutch 
mothers in their gowns of black with lovely neckruffs 
of spotless muslin and over their heads a coif of fine 
white linen. The little children ran about and played ; 
and the girls had on their heads little linen caps some- 
thing like their mothers. Most of them looked plump, 
and this was partly because, for two of their meals in 
the day, they ate simply butter and cheese. The Pil- 
grim children soon got to know some of these Dutch 

65 



66 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

boys and girls ; but, to a large extent, they kept to them- 
selves. 

On the top of some of the chimneys the Pilgrim boys 
and girls would be sure to see the heavy nests of the 
storks. As the Pilgrims came to Leyden in the early 
spring, they would see the long-legged storks come flying 
to the city from far countries. The mother stork laid 
her eggs in the old nest, while the father stork stood on 
one leg on ^'sentry go" on the roof or stalked stiffly up 
the street, looking as proud as though no mother stork 
had ever laid an egg before. The people thought one 
was very lucky if a stork made a nest on one's house. 
The Pilgrim boys and girls soon learned that no one 
must ever throw a stone at a stork or touch a stick of 
his nest. Very funny was it, some weeks later, to see 
the quaint, long-legged baby storks trying to fly. And 
the father stork would be very busy then hunting on 
the banks of the canal for frogs with which to feed his 
family. 

When the Pilgrims were in Leyden a little boy with 
a mop of curly hair lived in the big mill-house on the 
Western Rampart of the city on the river-bank by the 
White Gate. There two strange Gothic towers stood 
up for all the citizens to see, dark and silent against the 
setting sun. 

The boy's name was Rembrandt of the Rhine. ^ His 
mother, who loved the little boy, used to tell him stories 
out of the big Dutch Bible that rested on her knees. 
He listened on his little stool with elbows on knees and 
chin in hands, with his wonderful clear eyes looking 
right up at her soft cheeks, and her round, smiling 
face. 

*Born in Leyden, 1605. 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 67 

This boy is very important for us because he can 
do for us to-day what no one else in the world can per- 
form. He can show us Leyden as it was when the Pil- 
grims were there. 

For when he became a young jnan Rembrandt painted 
as no man has painted before or since. He was to the 
picture what Shakespeare was to the drama, and it is 
a wonderful thing that both of these great men were 
living at the very same time, and that our Pilgrims 
lived in both their lands. 

Rembrandt painted again and again the face of his 
old mother. We can see her to-day in his pictures with 
the lovely wrinkles on her cheeks like the wrinkles on 
a pippin at Christmas; and her face breaking into a 
quiet smile, or looking patiently sad. He painted the 
stories that she told him out of the Bible. She must 
have told them wonderfully, for he painted them so 
really that you seem to see the very stories come alive 
again. 

But he painted, too, the very things that the Pilgrim 
boys and girls saw as they went about the streets — 
the beggars whining on crutches from door to door, the 
cosy housewives in the market-place buying food; the 
meandering Old Rhine River creeping along between 
its strong banks; the steeples where the bells clanged 
on festival day; the network of canals up and down 
which the barges slowly nosed their way; the low, far- 
stretching land covered with thin grass; the waving 
arms of the windmills turning in the misty, amber- 
coloured air; the gale blowing the storks about the 
cloud-strewn sky, driving too the ships that scudded 
wildly by the shore in search of harbourage. 



68 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 



n 

If any of the Pil^i^i'ims waked in the night when the 
great clocks struck the hours, they would hear the sound 
of a trumpet clamouring across the house-tops of Ley- 
den. There was a watchman or sentry on top of one 
of the towers on the walls, and each hour he sounded 
his trumpet to say ^ 'All's Well/' and to tell any of the 
citizens who might be awake that they might sleep se- 
curely, for no enemy was in sight. 

The children would wonder at the sound of the 
trumpet, and still more at the great noise that was 
made on October 3rd through all the city. The bells 
pealed as though they had gone mad with joy, till the 
very towers seemed to rock with laughter. The guard 
of the city went marching proudly down the streets, 
armed with pike and gun and wearing their most bril- 
liant gala uniforms. The women and men and boys and 
girls all put on their finest clothes and went in boats 
up and down the canals waving their hands to their 
friends and having a lively time all during the fair, 
which lasted for ten whole days. 

The trumpet at night and the joyful fair were caused 
by the same adventure which had made Leyden famous 
for ever — the great siege which had made Leyden a 
better home of freedom and light for the Pilgrims than 
any other city in the world of those days. That siege, 
which is one of the greatest events in the history of 
the world, had happened some thirty-five years earlier 
when the fierce Spanish General Valdez had come with 
his armies against the city. His soldiers camped all 
round Leyden. No one could come in to help them or 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 69 

bring them food, and they had not enough soldiers in 
the city to sally out and fight the Spanish army. 

At the fair the people acted scenes from this siege 
in the open-air. The Pilgrim boys and girls, who were 
able to get to the fair, would in that way learn the 
things that had happened. 

Some of the scenes from the siege are as follows: 
The food had become less and less, and a plague broke 
out, killing many people. Some of the men of Leyden 
were so down-hearted that they wanted to give up the 
fight. So they went to the head man of the Town, 
Burgomaster Van der Werf, and said to him, "Yon 
must surrender to the enemy." They even threatened 
to kill him if he did not. 

"E'o," said he, "I will not give in. I can but die 
once, whether by your hands, the enemy's, or by the 
hand of God. . . . Your menaces do not move me ; my 
life is in your hands. Here is my sword, plunge it 
into my breast and divide my flesh among you. Take 
my body and appease your hunger. But expect no 
surrender so long as I remain alive.'' 

So the Leyden men plucked up courage. 

"You call us rat-eaters," they shouted at the Span- 
iards from the walls, "and it is true. So long, then, as 
ye hear a dog bark or a cat mew within the walls, ye 
may know that the city holds out. When all has 
perished but ourselves, be sure that we will eat our left 
arms, keep our right to defend our women, our liberty, 
and our religion against the foreign Spanish tyrant." 

At last one day some pigeons came flying across the 
country from the sea and over the Spanish army into 
Leyden. The pigeons settled on the city walls, and the 
soldiers took them and found a message written on very 



70 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

thin paper, and rolled up and put into little quills that 
were tied under the wings of the pigeons. The message 
said that Dutch ships were coming to their rescue with 
soldiers and with food. 

How could the ships come ? It was done in this way. 
The navy broke down the dykes, flooded the land on 
which the Spaniards were encamped with the waters of 
the sea. This swamped the Spanish army. Then the 
Dutch fleet came sailing in with food and all manner 
of good things. 

So the good N'etherlanders of Leyden showed how 
they could hold out bravely to defend their freedom to 
live and to worship as they desired, and set the world 
an immortal example of brave endurance for liberty. 
Learning of these brave deeds for freedom of the men of 
Leyden would make the Pilgrims more determined than 
ever that they too would put everything to the hazard 
for liberty. 

Ill 

The Pilgrims earned their living by doing many 
things while they were at Leyden. William Bradford 
was a vastijnwerker {i.e. a fustian-worker — fustian is a 
strong, coarse, cotton stuff). Others wove baize, made 
serge, carded wool, knitted stockings, engraved pictures, 
constructed trunks, cast metal into bells, or hammered 
gold into rings and brooches. They manufactured 
twine and string, chiselled stone and built it into houses, 
worked with chisel and saw and hammer and screw- 
driver at the carpenter's bench. William Brewster, 
being a scholar from Cambridge, taught the Dutchmen, 
Danes, and Germans to speak and write the English 
language, and was so clever at doing this that many 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 71 

men sent tlieir boys to him. He taught the sons of 
the great men of the State. 

Then William Brewster did something that was of 
still greater importance. It made King James I of 
England stretch out his arms across the sea, and try to 
imprison him even though he lived in another land. 
Brewster bought a printing press and set it up in a 
house in the Choor-steeg — Choir-lane, as we should say. 
A friend named Thomas Brewer helped him in this. 
So they printed and sent home to England books de- 
fending their wish to worship God in freedom — books 
such as were not allowed to be printed in England. But 
the King of England failed to get William Brewster 
into his clutches, though he sent messengers over to 
Holland to take him prisoner. 

The Pilgrims lived mostly in houses near the E'ew 
University that had been founded by William of 
Orange. The University was chosen by the people 
as William's gift in commemoration of the siege. 

The most famous of the houses that the Pilgrims had 
in Leyden was called ^'The House with the Green 
Door." It stood in the Klooksteeg (that is, Bell Lane) 
near the Pieterskerk (St. Peter's Church). It was a 
big house with a garden and a large piece of gTound 
by the side. In the upstairs rooms of the house lived 
John Eobinson, the wise and good pastor of the Church 
of the Pilgrims. 

He knew that men who loved liberty as his people 
did were often ready to fight for it over trifling things. 
He was a very learned man, and knew the great books 
of ancient Greece and Kome, and Christian writers of 
all the centuries. Yet his heart was simple and kind. 
The boys and girls loved him, and they thought of him 



72 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

with reverence. We can well believe that the reason 
why the people in the Church of which he was the 
minister quarrelled very little was due more than any- 
thing else to the gentle, brave spirit of good John 
Robinson. Under his leadership they certainly were a 
"happy band of Pilgrims." A man who joined them 
when they were at Ley den (Edward Winslow of Droit- 
wich) said, "I persuade myself never people upon 
earth lived more lovingly together and parted more 
sweetly than we the Church of Ley den did.'' 

He was to these Pilgrims what the Interpreter in 
The Pilgrims Progress was to Christian, Christiana, 
Mercy, and the boys and girls. So his House with the 
Green Door could well be called "the Interpreter's 
House" of these new Pilgrims. 

Here are some words of John Kobinson's which may 
— or may not — ^be too hard for us to understand while 
we are boys and girls; yet they ought to be set down 
in this book so that we may read them again and again, 
and be able to show them to people — if we meet such — 
who say that the Pilgrims were quarrelsome people. 

"I believe with my heart and profess with my tongue 
[wrote John Robinson] . . . that I have one and the 
same faith, hope, spirit, baptism and Lord which I had 
in the Church of England, and none other ; that I esteem 
so many in that Church ... as are truly partakers of 
that faith . . . for my Christian brethren and myseK 
a fellow-member with them of that one mystical body 
of Christ scattered far and wide throughout the world; 
that I have always, in spirit and affection, all Christian 
fellowship and communion with them." 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 73 

On Sunday morning the men and women of the 
Pilgrim Church at Lejden used to come to the House 
with the Green Door. They would walk to the door 
quietly, and, lifting the latch, enter the large room on 
the ground-floor which was their meeting-room for wor- 
ship. John Robinson, as he sat in the minister's seat, 
would see the people he loved and whose lives he knew 
come in and take their places. 

Here was young William Bradford with his strong, 
serious face — only just twenty-one years old, a fustian- 
worker, yet a student and a good organiser. William 
would not for long be able to keep his eyes from straying 
over to the place where Dorothy May sat in her black 
gown with the neat collar of white lawn and the close- 
fitting cap just failing to keep in order her rebellious 
curls. John Robinson married William Bradford and 
Dorothy May to one another in 1613. 

Then came the sturdy and clever William Brewster, 
who taught "great men's sons" in Leyden to speak Eng- 
lish and learned from them how their land was gov- 
erned. The strong, stalwart figure of Captain Miles 
Standish would fill the doorway, for he cast in his lot 
with the PilgTims while they were in Leyden, though 
he did not join the Church; and Miles and his wife 
would take their places in the room. Standish was a 
great fighter ; a soldier of fortune who took part in many 
a tussle in the E'etherlands, and whose sharp sword and 
strong arms were known far and wide, and were feared 
by the Spaniards. For he had a quick temper that 
flamed up into anger, yet a warm heart that made him 
a good friend. He was so brave that he did not know 
what fear was, and was always at his best in a tight 



74 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

corner and in a stiff figlit, for he could cut or contrive a 
way out when nine men out of ten would fail. 

Behind him (in the later years at Ley den) would 
come the very different face of Edward Winslow of 
Droitwich, the man of letters who had travelled much 
and had read many books and who even wrote some. 
These, with good Dr. Samuel Fuller, the physician, 
Robert Cushman, the business man, Isaac Allerton, the 
merchant (who married Fear Brewster), and many 
others, filled the great room of the Interpreter's House 
with the Green Door. 

So happily did they live together in Leyden that 
many others were drawn to join them. People in Eng- 
land living in Kent and Essex, Lincolnshire and North- 
amptonshire, went out to Leyden to escape persecution 
in their own land. After some years, the community 
had gTown from just over a hundred to as many as 
three hundred. And so honest and straight were they 
in their dealing that, after living in Leyden for twelve 
years, the magistrates of the city could actually say, 
"These English have lived among us these twelve years, 
and yet we never had any suit or accusation against any 
of them." 

IV 

The Pilgrims were thankful, in many ways, that 
they could live in Leyden in freedom. But Leyden 
was not and never could be really home. They desired 
strongly to be in England, which was their real home. 
That, however, could not be, for the Government there 
still persecuted men and women for wishing to be free 
in worship. So their thoughts roamed the world in 
search of some place where they could make a New 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 75 

England that would still be attached to the Old Coun- 
trj and under its King, yet might he free, and might 
become a new home. John Kobinson's thoughts often 
ran westward across the Atlantic Ocean to the West 
Indies — the islands off the coast of America — and to 
the other lands to which Kaleigh and Drake had sailed 
with the sea-dogs of Devon. 

Those, however, were hard lands to live in. There 
was dreadful fever in many of them; and fierce Red 
Indians in some; and in none was there any settled, 
ordered and secure life. If they sailed west it would 
certainly mean that the older people and the weaker 
ones could not go, but must stay at home. 

Their sons, however, were growing up, and the ad- 
venturous ones were joining the army of the ISTether- 
lands, or were sailing the world in Dutch merchant- 
ships, or were seeking to marry Dutch wives. The 
mothers and fathers wished very strongly that their 
children should go to a land where they would not be 
drawn away into a foreign life, but would build up one 
of their own. They desired above all to make their life 
where their boys and girls might grow in body and soul, 
breathing the air of a generous and bracing freedom. 

Their eyes turned across the ocean to the west. They 
knew how Sir Francis Brake and Sir Walter Ealeigh 
of Devon had "singed the Spaniard's beard" in the 
Western Ocean, and how that dauntless adventurer 
Captain John Smith faced perils among Indians and 
on the high seas to found in America a settlement that 
would be the beginning of a 'New England across the 
waters. At last they determined that they too would 
go and seek in the wilds a place where, at whatever 
cost to themselves, they could build a home. They felt 



76 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

the call that came to the Argonauts — to go out and take 
whatever adventure might fall to them, to capture the 
Golden Fleece of the free life of the soul. They were 
in spirit 

"Sea-rovers, conquerors, builders in the waste." 

John Robinson himself, their loved pastor, greatly 
wished to go. But he was not as strong in body as he 
was adventurous in his spirit. So it was determined 
that he must stay in Leyden and still lead the Pilgrims 
(and they were in the majority) who stayed on there. 
As he wrote to those who were leaving: ^^God knows 
how willingly ... I would have borne my part with 
you in this first brunt, were I not by strong necessitie 
held back for ye present." 

They decided to send to England to ask King James 
for a charter to allow those who could endure the hard- 
ships of the voyage and of the difficult and dangerous 
life to go across the Atlantic and settle on the east coast 
of America. To get that charter settled and then signed 
by the King was more difficult than winning any 
obstacle race. There were the hurdles of religious 
persecution to get over; the slippery pole of jealousy to 
clamber along ; the pond of greed to jump, and the gorse- 
bushes of prejudice to force. But at last, through a 
band of Merchant-adventurers — called the London Vir- 
ginia Company — ^they received their charter in June 
1619. They had permission to settle in Aanerica close 
by the estuary of the river Hudson. 

It took another year to arrange to raise the needed 
money for getting ships and buying provisions. The 
old friends, William Brewster of Scrooby and Williani 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 77 

Bradford of Austerfield, were to be the captains of the 
expedition* 

At length, in 1620, they secured a sixty-ton pinnace 
with the promising name of Speedwell. She was bought 
in England- Then she sailed across the sea to be fitted 
in Holland, and was brought to harbour at Delf shaven, 
— the sea-port for Ley den. 

Early on a bright midsummer morning in July 1620, 
the Pilgrims all met together in the great room which 
was the meeting-place of the Pilgrim Church in John 
Eobinson's House with the Green Door. There the 
Interpreter preached to them the last sermon that they 
ever heard from his lips. 

Then they passed out of the shadow of the room 
into the open street to the Nuns' Bridge, opposite to 
Robinson's House. Barges were moored near the bridge 
by the street side. All who were sailing in the Speed- 
well — as well as some like John Robinson himseK who 
were travelling as far as Delfshaven to see them off — 
went down into the barges ; mothers and fathers, young 
men and women, boys and girls, and one or two babies 
who would blink unconcernedly at the sunshine and not 
know at all that they were going out into a life that 
was as new as themselves. 

The barges were loosed and started. Those who were 
left behind waved farewell from the bank — ^though in- 
deed some of them could not see for the tears that 
blurred their eyesight. The barges crept quietly along 
into the Vliet, the canal that runs from Leyden to 
Delft. 

First they passed between the houses inside the city ; 
then they came to the water-gate that guarded Leyden 
so that no enemy might be able to enter. In front of 



78 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

them rose tlie northern walls of the town. The barges 
passed under the shadow of the tunnel through the walls 
and out into the open country. Looking back^ they 
could see the turrets standing above the Cow-gate and 
the glitter of the helmet of a sentry. It was their last 
look at Leyden. 

^'They lefte/' says William Bradford, ^Hhe goodly 
and pleasante citie which had been ther resting-place 
near twelve years; but they knew that they were pil- 
grimes. . . ." 

V 

Out across the low pasture lands they could see the 
quiet cows and sheep grazing and the windmills lazily 
turning in the breeze of the summer morning. For nine 
miles the barges butted their way through the waters 
of the canal, till they came to a bend to the left under 
the Hoorn Bridge by the Hague. Then for five miles 
the canal-boats went on till they came to the city of 
Delft. Going in under the walls, they passed through 
the centre of the city. Over them, they saw the tall 
tower, leaning out of the straight, of the Old Kirk of 
Delft. Opposite to it was the red-tiled house in which 
the great soldier and statesman of freedom — William 
the Silent — had been assassinated by the dagger of 
Balthazar Gerard. 

Again the shadow of the city walls fell upon them and 
the barges passed through the western watergates of 
Delft, out of the Vliet into the Schie and at last — at 
the village of Overshie — into the Delfshaven Canal. 
For full ten miles from Delft to Delfshaven the rippling 
wake of the barges lapped against the canal banks. The 
fathers would have to explain to the boys and girls that, 



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN DOOR 79 

althougli the canal was between banks that stood above 
the level of the fields, yet, all the time, they were them- 
selves really below the level of the sea, which was kept 
from rushing in by the great dykes and the sturdy sea- 
gates. 

They came, as evening was falling, to the end of the 
canal. Sluice-gates swung slowly open. The barges 
went into a great lock. The gates were closed again, 
and the sea-water was let into the lock. So they rose 
and rose as the lock filled, and then the second gates 
of the lock opened, and they moved onward. But still 
they were below sea-level, and had to enter another 
lock, where again the water poured in and lifted the 
barges still higher till at last, when the gates opened, 
the boys and girls saw a big pool where large vessels 
could float. From this pool the barges went into the 
outer harbour. 

Imagine the excitement of the boys and girls as 
they spelt on the bows of a little ship that lay moored 
by the wharves the word Speedwell. 

This was the ship that the Pilgrims had bought. On 
her decks they were to sail from Holland to England, 
and start on their great adventure across the ocean to 
the strange Western World of their dreams. 



CHAPTER V 
THE SHIP OF ADVENTURE 



THE PILGEIM WHO TUENED BACK 

Then said Pliable, Ah, neighbour Christian, where are you 
now? 

Truly, said Christian, I do not know. 

At this Pliable began to be offended and angrily said to his 
fellow. Is this the happiness you have told me all this while 
of? If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what 
may we expect betwixt this and our journey's end? May I 
get out again with my life, you shall possess the brave* 
country alone for me! And with that he gave a desperate 
struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the 
Slough which was next to his own home; so away he went 
and Christian saw him no more. 

A LOETIEK ARGO CLEAVES THE MAIN 

The world's great age begins anew. 

The golden years return. 
The earth doth like a snake renew 

Her winter weeds outworn : 
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam 

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. 

A loftier Argo cleaves the main ; 
Eraught with a later prize. 

Shelley's Hellas. 



CHAPTER V 
THE SHIP OF ADVEE^TUEE 



Few of the Pilgrims went to sleep in that short July 
night. They talked of the adventure that lay before 
them, and gave their last messages to the men who were 
staying behind. Even the boys, if they slept under the 
stars by the harbour, must have dreamed of sailing 
on deep waters, and of storm and shipwreck and perilous 
landing on strange shores. 

Dawn came up in a bright, clear sky on the wings 
of a favourable breeze across the harbour. The tide was 
rising; when it should come to the full they must 
sail. 

So they went aboard the Speedwell with their 
friends.^ 

They did not know how to part from one another. 
For they had lived for twelve years together. Fathers 
were saying '^Good-bye'' to their sons and mothers to 
their daughters. William Bradford tells us: 

^Truly dolfull was the sight of that sadd and mourn- 
full parting ; to see what sighs and sobbs and praires did 

* Bradford describes the farewell as taking place on board. 
Edward Winslow says that the farewell occurred on the quay. I 
adopt Bradford's record. 

83 



84 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

sound amongst tliem, what tears did gush from every 
eye, and pithy speeches peirst each harte; that sundry 
of the Dutch strangers that stood on the key as specta- 
tors could not refraine from tears. . . . But the tide 
(which stays for no man) called them away that were 
thus loath to departe." 

John Robinson fell upon his knees and asked for 
God's blessing on all the Pilgrims. The friends went 
ashore. The sails were hoisted. The sailors cast loose 
the ship. The Speedivell swung away from the quay- 
side. There was a crack and a blaze, followed by a hol- 
low roar. The men on the ship fired a volley from their 
muskets into the air; three of the ship's five cannon 
then boomed a salute. 

Soon the fluttering of kerchiefs on the quay-side grew 
less and less. The little ship began to feel the heave 
and fall of the swell of the tide in the open sea. She 
ran south-west through the Channel between Dover and 
Calais, and, passing the harbour of Folkestone and the 
long flats of Romney Marsh, was driven by the fair wind 
westward under the summer sky until, sighting the Isle 
of Wight, she ran in the narrow channel past Ports- 
mouth to Southampton. 

Ahead of the Speedivell^ another vessel had sailed 
there from London. She came past the mouth of the 
Medway and down Channel to Southampton — a sliip of 
one hundred and eighty tons. She was to become per- 
haps the best-known boat in all the story of the world — 
the Mayflower.'^ Having reached Southampton ahead 

* But, curiously enough, no record written by any one who 
sailed in her gives her name. The first mention of her name 
as the Mayflower comes in Nathaniel Morton's NetO' England'^ 



THE SHIP OF ADVENTURE 85 

of the Speedwell, she was riding easily at anchor off the 
West Quay when the Pilgrims arrived from Leyden. 
She had brought with her from London other folk — men 
who sympathised with the Leyden Pilgrims, and wished 
to share their adventure across the ocean. 

Through the last days of July they all stayed in 
Southampton. They were kept there into the beginning 
of August. The delay was partly due to the fact that a 
man whom they had trusted with their arrangements 
had made alterations in their agreement, of which they 
did not approve. So the contract with the Merchant 
Adventurers remained unsigned ; in consequence money 
was not advanced to them, and the PilgTims were forced 
— before they could sail away — to pay their harbour 
dues out of the money they had with them. They sold 
sixty pounds' worth of their provisions on board ship 
to pay the dues before leaving. They were in difficult 
straits after reducing their provisions; but they were 
not daunted. 

"We have/' they wrote on August 3, 1620, "scarce 
any butter, no oyle, not a sole to mend a shoe, nor every 
man a sword to his side, wanting many muskets, much 
armoure, etc. And yet we are willing to expose our- 
selves to shuch eminente dangers as are like to insue, 
and trust to the good providence of God rather than His 
name and truth should be evill spoken of for us." 

The delay of those days seemed of very little import- 
ance ; but, as we shall see, it came perilously near ruin- 
iag the expedition. 

Memorials, published in 1669, forty-nine years later on. And, 

as it is quite certain that a ship called the Mayfoioer sailed to 

bring more Pilgrims from Leyden in 1629-30, there may have 
been confusion. 



86 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 



II 

At length all arrangements were clear. The Speedivell 
took thirty of the Pilgrims ; ninety were placed aboard 
the larger ship, the Mayflower. On August 5th, 1620, 
the larger and smaller ship started together, and tacked 
down Southampton Water and through the Solent. 
Leaving the l!^eedles of the Isle of Wight astern, they 
started westward. But the delay had cost them dear; 
for the fair breeze had dropped and the wind was now 
against them. 

They beat down the Channel for three or four days, 
making but little progress. The captain of the Speed- 
well ran up a startling message. He said that she had 
sprung a dangerous leak. 

''We must,'' he declared, "put into Dartmouth for re- 
pairs." 

So they sailed in between the lovely headlands of 
the river Dart. The tanned old Devonshire sailor-men 
on the harbour side gazed curiously at the Pilgrims as 
they came ashore. The beautiful steep hill-sides that 
towered above each bank of the river Dart, covered with 
the green thick woods that came down till the very 
leaves dipped in the waters of the river itself, must have 
seemed wonderful to the Pilgrim boys and girls. For 
in their homes in Eastern England and in Leyden all 
the canals and rivers that they had ever seen ran 
through flat lands that hardly had even tiny hills to re- 
lieve their endless levels. 

The grizzled shipwrights of Dartmouth set to work 
on the Speedivell and overhauled her from stem to stem, 
till they declared that she was seaworthy, and could face 



THE SHIP OF ADVENTURE 87 

the gales of the Atlantic Ocean itself. So the Pilgrims 
went aboard her again, and once more sails were hoisted 
and the two ships went careering out into the open sea. 

They sailed along past the coast of Devon and Corn- 
wall. The boys and girls, standing in the stern, strained 
their eyes to catch the last glimpse of the warm-brown 
rocks of Land's End. At last they were ont in the full 
swing of the Atlantic. For day after day they sailed 
till they had put over three hundred sea-miles between 
themselves and Land's End. 

Then Captain Reynolds of the Speedwell came to the 
Pilgrims with an announcement that frightened some of 
them and grieved them all. 

"The ship has sprung a serious leak again," he said. 
"I can only keep her afloat by having the men at the 
pumps day and night." 

They signalled the Mayflower to tell her what the 
captain said. We can never be quite sure whether there 
was a bad leak in the Speedwell or not ; for some of the 
Pilgrims felt sure that the ship was really sound 
enough, but that, as one of them said, "a leak had 
sprung in the captain's courage," and that Reynolds 
pretended that there was a leak because he was fright- 
ened to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and in so small a ship 
to sail to a strange and savage land. 

In any case, there was nothing for it but for both 
ships to turn in their tracks and beat their weary way 
back again. They sighted Land's End once more, and, 
running eastward, sailed in to Plymouth harbour again^ 
where they landed at the Old Barbican. These delays 
took the heart out of all but the bravest and most de- 
termined of the Pilgrims. They were in the Slough of 
Despond. Eighteen of them — like Mr. Pliable in The 



aa THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Pilgrim's Progress — wcro so discouraged that they de- 
cided not to go at all. They turned hack. As William 
Bradford, who was among the valiant ones who would 
not turn back, said, "Like Gedion's armie, this small 
number was dcvided, as if the Lord by this worke of 
His x>rovidenco thought these few to many for the great 
worko He had to doe." 

So it was decided not to take the little Speediuell with 
them at all. The Pliablcs and their captain went aboard 
her, and she sailed back along the coast of Hampshire, 
Sussex, and Kent up the estuary of the Thames, and so 
to inglorious safety at London Bridge. The Great- 
hearts and Valiants determined to sail in spite of all. 
The good, stout-hearted Devon folk of Plymouth were 
very kind to the brave Pilgrims who were going for- 
ward, and helped them to stock their ship for the voy- 
age. The Pilgrims, many years after, spoke of that 
kindness done to them in their dark time. 

So tJiey walked for the last time on Plymouth Hoe 
where Drake had played his game of bowls. The twelve 
extra Pilgrims left over from the Speedwell went aboard 
the Mayflower. There were now one hundred and two 
men, women, boys, and girls on board the ship. Thirty- 
four of them were gi'own men. Eighteen were wives. 
There were twenty boys on board and eight girls. Nine- 
teen of the travellers w^re men-servants, and three were 
maid-servants. 

Ill 

On September 6th all was ready. Sails were hoisted 
to a good breeze that was with them. They swung out 
to sea, and, with their bows toward the sunset, went 
bowling merrily and swiftly into the west. For day 



THE SHIP OF ADVENTURE 89 

after day in fine weatlier and with a strong favouring 
wind they ran on their journey. They looked forward 
to reaching their journey's end without further adven- 
ture. 

But their delays had brought them to the time of 
the equinoctial gales. These are the storms that come 
each year at the time in September when in Britain and 
North America the days and nights are equal in length. 

The wind began to whistle through the cordage. 
''White horses" crested the waves. The seamen went 
aloft to furl the sails. The waves were lashed into fury 
by the wind, which grew more and more violent till a 
gale was raging. The gale increased to a tempest. 

The great Atlantic rollers swept seething and hissing 
across the streaming decks of the little ship. She shiv- 
ered from stem to stern as the waves struck her. She 
climbed the giddy heights of one wave only to be slung 
dizzily down its slopes into dark chasms of water that 
threatened to swallow her up and sink her into the 
depths. 

The Pilgrims were crowded down in the stifling air 
between decks. The hatches of the deck were closed. 
The boys and girls were flung about as the ship rolled 
and tossed in the waves. The gun port-holes were 
screwed tight. The dim yellow light of a lantern that 
hung from a beam, shone fitfully on the Pilgrims. 
Many were ill. The close air and the stench were pois- 
onous. Yet the hatches could not be opened. 

The Pilgrims heard the Mayflower creak and groan 
in every timber as she reeled before the storm. The 
sea crept in through the straining planks, and washed 
sullenly across the floor, soaking their clothes and their 
luggage. Then there was a silence among them all as 



90 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

they heard a wrenching sound, as though the very ship 
herself were breaking up. 

The main beam of the ship had been bowed and 
cracked by the storm. The beam was amidships. The 
captain examined it. He and his seamen could see at 
once that there was serious danger of the ship breaking 
up if her beam were wrenched so that it could not hold 
out the sides of the ship and keep her taut, and help 
her to resist the battering of the waves. 

As the captain with serious face talked it over with 
his oiScers, Brewster and Bradford and some other Pil- 
grims joined the group. 

^ 'Would it not be better even now to turn back and 
sail for home ?" suggested one of the Pilgrims. 

^'N'o," replied the captain, ''that would be of no use. 
"We are half-way across the Atlantic now. It is as far 
to go back as it is to go on. We must get this beam 
in her place again." 

It was fortunate that one of the Pilgrims^ — ^who must 
have been a man of strong good sense — had brought 
with him a powerful jack-screw. They placed this 
under the beam and, pulling at the lever that turned 
the screw, they at length forced the bent main-beam 
straight again. Having thriist the great timber back 
into its place, in order to make it doubly secure, they 
got a strong post; this they stood upon the lower deck, 
and forced the top end in under the cracked beam and 
lashed it into place. 

They found, however, that the severe wrenching of 
the ship had opened cracks in her timbers through which 
the sea was leaking into the hull. They soaked oakum 
in tar and caulked the timbers with it — that is, they 
rammed the tarred oakum firmly in between the edges 



THE SHIP OF ADVENTURE 91 

of the planks to keep the water from rushing into the 
ship. 

They felt safer now; but their troubles were not at 
an end. The wind sank for a little; but it soon began 
to rage again. They dared not spread an inch of sail. 
Kight followed day and day night, yet still they scudded 
before the tempest under bare masts. The wind 
shrieked continuously through the rigging. Wave after 
wave came chasing across the ocean, like wolves hunt- 
ing the little ship, and then flung themselves greedily 
over her as though to swallow her up. But the daunt- 
less Mayflower shook herself free again and again, and 
plunged away westward. 

In the midst of all this din and turmoil one day there 
mingled strangely with the roar of the seas the first 
cries of a little baby boy. He was born there between 
the upper and lower deck of the Mayflower. His 
mother was the wife of Stephen Hopkins. They bap- 
tized the baby, giving him the name Oceanus, because 
he was born on the Atlantic. 

One of the Pilgrims could not endure the closed-in 
life cramped between the decks where a man could 
hardly stand upright and no fresh air came. His name 
was John Howland. He climbed the steps and passed 
through the gratings on to the top deck. An enormous 
wave, sweeping over the ship at the very moment, 
caught him up as though he were a wisp of straw and 
flung him overboard. Half stunned by the blow, gasp- 
ing for breath and almost blinded by the spray, he gave 
himself up for lost. At that moment a cord lashed 
across him. The topsail-halyards had been torn by the 
storm and one end was trailing in the sea. He snatched 
at this cordage — like a drowning man clutching at a 



92 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

straw. He cauglit it and held on — the waves swinging 
him into the height and then down into green, cavern- 
ous, horrihle depths. 

The sailors, peering over the bulwarks, saw to their 
astonishment that he was alive and was hanging on to 
the rope. They themselves — though each succeeding 
wave threatened to sweep them overboard too — hauled 
at the halyards till inch by inch they drew John How- 
land up the slippery sides of the ship and he was once 
more, to his own and every one else's amazement, safely 
between decks. We can imagine the boys sitting round 
him with open eyes and ears afterwards as he told the 
story of his adventure. 



lY 

Eight weeks had now gone by since they had sailed 
for the second time out of Plymouth Harbour. For 
many days they had been battened below hatches 
crowded close together in a little wooden ship far too 
small either for their number or for the perils of a 
journey across the Atlantic. Then one of the men 
(William Butten) a servant of Samuel Fuller, fell ill. 
He swiftly became worse and died. They buried him 
at sea, in the midst of the tossing waters. The Pil- 
grims felt as though everything was against them ; and 
some even of the bravest began to lose heart. ^ 'Being 
pestered nine weeks in this leaking, unwholesome ship, 
lying wet in their cabins ; most of them grew very weak, 
and weary of the sea." ^ 

* Arber's edition of Captain John Sinith^ p. 260. 



94 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Three more days passed by. They were now able to 
be on deck. Suddenly the cry came from one of the 
clearest-sighted sailors, ^'Land ho !'' 

Immediately the Pilgrims rushed to the bows and 
strained their eyes westward. There, sure enough, was 
land. It was flat, like the country to which they had 
been accustomed. But it was covered with trees. 

^'What bit of coast is this V^ the Pilgrims asked Cap- 
tain Jones. 

"I think," said he, "that this is the eastern side of 
Cape Cod." 

The faces of some of the leaders among the Pilgrims 
would gTow serious when they heard this, for they were 
hoping to land on a far better part of the coast called 
Manhattan, by the river Hudson. Cape Cod was some 
distance north of Manhattan.^ 

The captain headed the ship round. He said that 
he was going to turn her towards the Hudson River at 
the mouth of which Manhattan Island stands. But, 
after tacking and going about for hours and hours, the 
Mayflower was in the midst of dangerous shoals on 
which she might run agTound at any moment. Dan- 
gerous currents swept through narrow channels between 
the shoals through the night. 

The captain and the leader of the PilgTims consulted 
together as to what they should do. This was the di- 
lemma. 

The narrow channel through the shoals southward 
to the Hudson was in the direction that they wished 
to take, for it led to Manliattan. But that channel was 

*The Dutch did establish a trading city at Manhattan, which 
they called New Amsterdam ; but later it became what it is now — 
New York. 



THE SHIP OF ADVENTURE 95 

dangerous and was long; and darkness was coming on. 
The Hudson was to windward, and it was difficult to 
beat a way southward in shoal water against a stiff No- 
vember gale. 

What is more, some of the Pilgrims were falling ill 
with scurvy and other diseases, through being cramped 
so long in between decks, and through lack of fresh 
vegetables and other food and water. They must 
quickly get to land. 

They decided, therefore, to sail round the "crook- 
handle" head of Cape Cod.^ They could anchor there 
in shelter, and, with the help of their ship's boat, and 
a shallop that was stowed in the hold in sections, could 
explore that headland to see what kind of land it con- 
cealed, and whether they would be wise to settle there. 
The ship was turned about again ; with sails spread she 
ran safely round the headland. With a splash the an- 
chor was dropped. The Pilgrims fell on their knees 
and said their prayers of thanks to God who had brought 
them safely over the vast waste of waters through the 
tempest. They had been sixty-five days crossing the 
Atlantic Ocean. It was the evening of November 19th, 
1620 — and the dawn of a new day for freedom in all 
the world. 

The great crossing was ended. But the end of the 
voyage was only the beginning of the adventure. 

*See map, page 93. 



CHAPTER YI 
THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTma 



FEESH AND STEONG THE WOELD WE SEIZE 

All the past we leave behind; 

We debouch upon a newer, mightier 

World, varied world; 
-Fresh and strong- the world we seize. 
World of labour and the march. 

Pioneers! O Pioneers! 
Till with sound of trumpet. 
Far, far off the daybreak call — hark! how loud and clear I 

hear it wind; 
Swift! to the head of the army! — swift! 
Spring to your places. 
Pioneers! O Pioneers! 

Walt Whitman. 

THE EED INDIAN'S VISION 

I have seen it in a vision. 
Seen the great canoe with pinions. 
Seen the people with white faces. 
Seen the coming of this bearded 
People of the wooden vessel 
From the regions of the morning. 
From the shining land of Wabun. 

''Gitchi Manito," the Mighty, 
The Great Spirit, the Creator, 
Sends them hither on his errand. 
Sends them to us with his message. 

Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha. 



CHAPTER YI 
THE ADVEJSTTURES OF SCOUTING 



The Pilgrims, as they looked out from the deck of the 
Mayflower to the coast, were glad because the perils of 
the tempest were over, and the horrors of the long voy- 
age in the dark between decks had passed. 

The boys, gazing ont over the bulwarks, saw that their 
ship was floating safely on the quiet waters of a splen- 
did natural harbour. There was room for all the navies 
of the world of that day to come to anchor in Cape 
Cod Harbour. Outside glittered the wider waters of 
Cape Cod Bay running away south and west as far as 
eye could see. 

Suddenly a boy saw a curious fountain of water rise 
from the sea in a white spray, and fall back into the 
water; then another and another went up. 

"The whales are spouting," said the sailors. 

The Pilgrims and the sailors were very sorry that 
they had no whaling harpoons with them, for they could 
have hunted and killed some of the giant whales and 
boiled down the blubber. Thus they could have made 
oil to send home to England — enough to pay over and 
over again for all the cost of the voyage in the May- 
flower. They reckoned that the whales that they saw 

99 



100 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

then would have brought them over three thousand 
pounds' worth of oil. 

As thej talked of the future, one man said that they 
must do this thing, and one man another; some were 
for going off on their own account and dividing up. 
But, as the leaders heard this talk, they knew that in a 
wild land, in which savage Indians lived, it would be 
death to divide. They must stay together; and they 
must work together. Therefore, they said to one an- 
other, we must have a government. 

But what government could they have — just a hun- 
dred people, and only thirty-four of them grown men? 
King James and his Government were three thousand 
miles away across the trackless ocean. So they made 
up their minds that they would themselves form a gov- 
ernment in which all would freely join together. It 
was simple and easy to do this; yet the hour when, in 
the cabin of the Mayflower, the heroic thirty-four men 
signed the paper to say that they joined in one com- 
monwealth was a great birthday of what men call "de- 
mocracy^' — "government of the people, by the people, 
for the people." 

These are the words to which they signed their 
names : 

"In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are 
underwriten, the loyall subjects of our dread Soveraigne 
Lord King James hy the grace of God, of great Britaine, 
France, and Ireland Icing, defender of the faith, etc. 
Hauing undertalcen, for the glorie of God, and aduance- 
mente of the christian faith and honour of our Tcing 
and countrie a voyage to plant the first colonie in the 
'Northeme parts of Virginia, Doe hy these presents sol- 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 101 

emnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of 
another; couenant and combine ourselues togeather into 
a ciuill body politick; for our better ordering and pres- 
eruation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by 
virtue hearof to enacte, constitute^ and frame shuch just 
and equall lawes, ordinances. Acts, constitutions, and 
offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete 
and conuenient for the generall good of the Colonic. 
Unto which we promise all due submission and obedir 
ence. In witnes whereof we haue hereunder subscribed 
our names at Cap Codd the 11 of Nouember in the year 
of the raigne of our soueraigne Lord King James of 
England, France, and Ireland the eighteenth and of 
Scotland the fiftie fourth Anno Domini 1620/' 

Just as in a scout troop or a football or baseball team 
there must always be some one wlio is in authority, and 
can tell the others what to do — as the captain of a team 
can — so the Pilgrims knew that, having joined them- 
selves freely together by this solemn document, they 
also must have one man to be head of them all. So 
they elected John Carver their Governor for the first 
year. 

^^But hear," as William Bradford says, "I cannot 
but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at 
this poore peoples presente condition. . . . Being thus 
passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles . . . they 
had now no friends to wellcome them, nor inns to en- 
tertaine or refresh their weather-beaten bodys, no houses 
or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. 
It is recorded in scripture ^ as a mercie to the apostle 
and his shipwraked company, that the barbarians 

*Acts xxviii. 



102 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

showed tliem no smale kindnes in refreshing them, hnt 
these savage barbarians, when they mette with them 
(as after will appeare) were readier to fill their sides 
full of arrows then otherwise. And for the season it 
was winter/' 

As they went np on to the deck and looked out again 
over the land, the most important question to decide 
was this: "Is this land, by the shore of which we are 
now anchored, a good land for us to live in, or must we 
sail on to find a better place ?" 

The boys looked at the shore, and wondered whether 
the Red Indians, of whom they had heard, were lurk-' 
ing, tomahawk in hand, in the woods. For the woods 
came right down to the water's edge. There were 
spreading oak-trees now dropping their acorns in the 
soil; tall, straight pines with dark green needles and 
brown pine-cones; there were also junipers and many 
shrubs that would make a scent when they burnt — like 
sassafras. 

The sound of the whizzing of many thousand wings 
filled the air. Great flocks of wild-duck and other wild- 
fowl flew round and round in the air ; more than could 
ever be counted, wheeling and forming and reforming 
like regiments in the sky. 

The boys and girls on the May-flower looked at the 
birds with excitement and joy. But the leaders of the 
expedition looked serious; for the flying of these my- 
riads of wild-birds from the north toward the south 
meant that the winter was coming, and such winter as 
the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower had never known in 
all their lives. 

There was no time to be lost if they were to make 
a settlement and have some roof over their heads be- 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 103 

fore the icy winter swooped down upon them from the 
north. If winter came, and they were unprepared, none 
of them would live till the coming of the spring. 

Captain Jones of the Mayflower said to them, ^'You 
must decide at once. I have only just enough provi- 
sions for the voyage back to England, without any more 
delay." 

There was the even more insistent power ordering 
them to make haste — the power of the grip of winter. 
Already, as we have seen, the wild-birds had flown south 
crying out that the ice and snow were hunting them 
ever southward. 

The leaders of the Pilgrims asked Captain Jones to 
cruise about along the shore in search of the best place 
for settling. 

''No,'' said Captain Jones, "I will not do that. You 
have your little sailing-boat on board. You must put 
her together and the men must explore the coast for 
themselves. Then I will sail to the place you choose, 
and put you all ashore." 

II 

It was a Saturday. So they decided to start on the 
Monday to put together the shallop — a small sailing- 
boat of from twelve to fifteen tons. 

Without waiting for that, however, sixteen of the 
men decided to go ashore on that very day for a few 
hours to explore. They did not know what Eed Indians 
there might be lurking among the trees on the shore ; so 
they all armed themselves well, with corselet and hau- 
berks and muskets. 

The boys would want to jump into the ship's boat 
and go with the men in this scouting party, but that 



104 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

was not allowed. So they watched the boat-load of 
armed men as they rowed across the water. The scout- 
ing party beached the boat. Then they leapt out on to 
the sandy shore, walked up the beach and disappeared 
among the trees. 

Hours passed, and the afternoon wore on. 'No one 
on board the Mayfloiver knew what had come to the 
men who had gone into the woods to explore. At last, 
as the shadows were lengthening, they began to become 
anxious ; but soon they saw the party of explorers come 
out from the trees, all the sixteen of them safe. They 
jumped into the boat and rowed back to the Mayflower, 
to tell of their experiences. 

^'The land is all hills of sand," they said, ^Qike the 
dunes in the Low Country of Holland. The woods are 
not like the copses in England, full of bushes. They 
are like a park or a grove, where you can walk easily 
with no undergrowth. We did not see any sign of men 
at all.'' 

So they all went to their rest, and on the next day — 
Sunday — they joined quietly in worship on the ship, 
thanking God for having brought them through the 
tempest and over the waste of waters to their desired 
haven. 

On Monday morning the carpenters and some others 
of the men began to fit together the shallop. 

"We shall have her ready for taking the water in a 
few days," they said. 

They were mistaken. The rolling and tossing in the 
tempest and the wrenching and grinding of the tim- 
bers of the Mayfloiver had strained the sections of the 
sliallop, and had twisted many of the parts out of shape. 
With chisel and saw, hammer and screwdriver, they 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 105 

weait to work day after day. Yet still the shallop was 
far from being ready to sail. 

Some of the hotheaded among the men, of whom the 
fiery Captain Miles Standish was one, grew very im- 
patient. "We will go and explore the land without the 
shallop,'' they said. 

Some of the older men shook their heads and said 
that that was very dangerous. But all the Pilgrims 
thought that they were brave men to be ready to go off 
in a small party without the bigger boat. So it was de- 
cided to let them go. 

Captain Miles Standish, who had fought in many a 
tussle with the Spaniards in Holland, and was the finest 
soldier of them all, was made captain of the Pilgrim 
Scouts. There were sixteen of them. Each was armed 
with corselet, musket, and sword. 

The older men, however, with the governor, said that 
Miles Standish must have some wiser heads alongside 
his brave spirit. So they sfent young William Bradford, 
Stephen Hopkins, and Edward Tilley with the scouting 
expedition. 

It was Wednesday, November 15th, when Miles 
Standish and his men tumbled from the deck of the 
Mayflower into the boat, and rowed to the shore. Leap- 
ing from the boat to the beach, they began to walk south- 
ward along the shore. 

Suddenly they all came to a halt. Ahead of them on 
the beach were other men. There were six of them. 
They had a dog with them. They were Bed Indians, 

The Pilgrim Scouts pushed on, hoping to be able 
to find out from the Indians what kind of land they 
were in. But, as they went on, the Bed Indians turned 
and ran. They disappeared among the trees and were 



[106 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

soon lost in tlie woods. Miles Standisli led his men in 
pursuit; not to hunt the Indians, but to find their set- 
tlement, and try to make friends with them. 

They pushed through the woods on the trail in In- 
dian file up hill and down dale for mile after mile ; but 
the Indians always kept well ahead of them. The sun 
came near the horizon. They had followed the trail 
for ten miles into the woods. Around them was the 
silence of the mysterious forests in which the Indians 
were hidden. Their friends in the ship were now far 
from them. They could not return to the Mayflower 
that night : nor did they wish to do so, for they desired 
at all risks to discover swiftly the lie of the land, and 
whether they could live in it. 

Captain Miles Standish gave some orders. They un- 
slung the axes that they had carried and hewed some 
trees down. Then they built up a barricade of logs 
around them. This made a little fort. In the centre 
they lighted a fire of the branches. The leaping flames 
of the fire threw grotesque, jumping shadows on the 
background of trees. 

At the edge of the barricade Captain Standish placed 
some of the men as sentries. They had supper over the 
camp-fire, talking over the events of the day, -and mak- 
ing plans for to-morrow. At last they lay down on the 
ground under the autumn sky, with the sough of the 
wind in the trees whispering in their ears and the stars 
glittering through the branches. They slept the sleep 
of tired men. 

The sentries kept the fire going, for it was cold in 
the N'ovember night. As the first pink flush of light 
came up in the sky from the Atlantic they woke. After 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 107 

grilling their breakfast on the fire, they started out on 
another day's exploration. 

The ''going" was very hard. Dense thickets of bushes 
grew between the trees. The bushes were so thick and 
close together that the tough branches actually caught 
their armour and wrenched it away from their bodies. 

Then the thickets grew less dense. They caught sight 
of greyish-brown moving forms among the trees, and 
then antlers. The frightened eyes of deer stared at 
them, and then the creatures scampered av/ay along the 
deer-paths. Following these paths Miles Standish and 
William Bradford with the others, at about eleven in 
the morning, came to places where bright fresh springs 
of water bubbled out of the ground, and ran down in 
rivulets toward the sea. 

They knew now that there was some food and water 
in the land; but they wished to know what seed would 
grow in the soil. 

They turned west, and strode rapidly and easily down 
through coppices to the beach. They had made a great 
semicircle and were only four miles from the Maif- 
flower. It had been arranged that, if they were safe 
and within reach, they should signal by fire to ease the 
minds of their wives and boys and girls on the ship. So 
they gathered together sticks^ branches, shrubs and 
bushes, and built up a heap. Then they lighted it, and 
the whole stack roared up into a splendid bonfire the 
flames of which could be seen right across the water by 
the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, 

Then they turned from the coast of the bay, and pene- 
trated the woods again. Soon they saw light through 
the trees. 

''It is an Indian clearing," said one as they came out 



108 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

on to land that still had in it some of the stumps of the 
trees. They could see too that some of the land had 
been sown with corn. At one side, too, they saw some 
graves of Eed Indians. 

They pushed on farther : there they found in a clear- 
ing the stubble of that year's corn. This showed that 
the soil would grow corn, and that there were settled 
Indian tribes in the country. 

They pushed down toward the beach, and saw what 
looked like a ruin. It was, in fact, the ruin of a house, 
and by it they discovered, to their surprise, a great iron 
kettle. This showed quite plainly that some ship's crew 
from England or Europe had lighted on this spot. 

They passed along, and saw some heaps of sand piled 
up. They felt certain that under these heaps something 
must be hidden. So they dug in the sand. And, as 
William Bradford tells us, to their joy they discovered 
"diverce faire Indean baskets filled with corne, and 
some in eares faire and good, of divorce collours, which 
seemed to them a very goodly sight." 

They took what they could carry, making up their 
minds that they would pay back the Indians when they 
could come upon them. The rest of the corn they buried 
again in the sand. So they took to the boat again, 
laden with corn, and rowed back to the Mayflower. So 
(as William Bradford said) they, "like the men from 
Eshcoll, carried with them of the fruits of the land, and 
showed their breethren; of which, and their returne, 
they were marvelusly glad, and their harts incouraged." 

All the Pilgrims were glad that they had found that 
com would grow in the land, and that there were deer 
that could be hunted in the woods for venison. 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 109 



III 

At last the twelve-ton shallop was ready and in the 
water. She hoisted her sail, and, with the long boat 
of the ship for company and for getting to the beach 
when they wished "some thirty men" of the Pilgrims 
sailed down the coast. Autumn was now fast turning 
to winter. There was no time to waste. In fact, they 
were already in peril of cold. 

Miles Standish was not captain of this second expe- 
dition. For, as it was a voyage by water, Captain Jones 
of the Mayflower was made commander. The wintry 
storms broke soon after they had started. Violent head- 
winds blew in the teeth of the shallop, and she had to 
tack hither and thither to try to beat up against the 
gale. Heavy seas broke over her and drenched the men, 
and the icy wind almost froze them as they stood drip- 
ping in the little vessel. 

They set out to land. The boat was tossed about in 
the boiling surf. On reaching the beach they could not 
get right up to the sand, and were forced to wade ashore. 
As they started to wade a blinding blizzard of snow 
swept down upon them, blotting out land and sea. They 
suffered agonies in the freezing blasts of the wind, aid 
under the drenching drive of snow and surf. 

Little did the Pilgrim Scouts on the expedition find 
to repay their dreadful sufferings. One day the gaunt 
ribs and broken planks of a French fishing ship jutted 
out of the water ahead of them. Then they saw above 
the beach a group of Indian wigwams. But the Indians 
had left. Worst of all, they nowhere found a good place 
in which to settle and build houses. 



110 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

They went farther on into the Pamet region and 
there they found a good little protected harbour for 
small sailing-boats. There was cornland, too, above the 
shore. Fish teemed in the water and whales could be 
seen spouting fountains that flashed back in glittering 
spray. But there were no springs of fresh water, nor 
was there any harbour in which large ships could come 
to anchor. 

They knew that, even if they were to settle there, and 
build houses, they would be forced very soon to dis- 
mantle their homes and leave their new houses to rot. 
So they decided that they would not establish them- 
selves in that bay. 

On the following Thursday they sailed back to the 
Mayflower. There was great excitement on board, for, 
while they were away, the very first English baby to be 
born after they reached N^ew England — the first real 
native of the new Pilgrim colony — had come to her 
parents on board the Mayflower, She was called Pere- 
grine White. 

IV 

The case of the Pilgrims was becoming desperate. 
Winter was closing in upon them; yet they seemed to 
be as far as ever from finding a place in which to build 
homes for themselves and to spend their lives. So, on 
the following Wednesday, December 6th, ten men were 
chosen from a number who volunteered for active ex- 
ploration of the whole of the great bay. With the ten 
Pilgrims there went five of the crew of the Mayflower — 
three sailors, with the mate Clarke and the pilot Coppin. 

For hour after hour they coasted southward down 
the west coast of the Cape; that is, they explored thor- 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 111 

oughly all that long, narrow neck of land which runs 
from Cape Cod. They sailed and walked for over 
twenty miles in this way. 

^The weather/' says William Bradford, ^^was very 
could, and it frose so hard as the sprea of the sea light- 
ing on their coats, they were as if they had been glased ; 
yet that night betimes they gott downe into the botome 
of the bay -^ and as they drue nere the shore they saw 
some -lO- or '12- Indeans very busie aboute some thing." 

They landed that night abont a league or more from 
the Indians. It was very difficult to get to the beach, 
as the sea by the shore was very shallow. It was now 
growing dark. As swiftly as possible in the twilight 
they hewed down some trees and arranged the logs in 
a barricade. 

One man was set as sentinel. The others lay down 
to rest. The sentinel as he looked along the beach ^^saw 
the smoake of the fire the savages made that night." 

On the next day they went on a different plan. Some 
of the PilgTims went ashore and walked along by the 
shore or on the higher ground. The others stayed in 
the shallop. The little vessel sailed along hugging the 
coast ; those on land tried to keep in sight of her, while, 
at the same time, exploring as much as they possibly 
could of the country. 

The party on shore "came to the place wher they 
saw the Indeans the night before, and found they had 
been cutting up a great fish like a grampus, being some 
•2* inches thike of fate like a hogg." 

So they called this Grampus Bay. 

All day long they walked along in the woods. They 

^They passed to the south of Billirxgsgate Point and landed 
near the present Eastham, where they passed that night. 



112 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

did not meet with any Indians that day, though it is 
certain that the Indians were watching them. 

"When the snne grue low/' Bradford, who was with 
the party, tells us, "they hasted out of the woods to 
meete with their shallop, to whom they made signes to 
come to them into a creeke hardby, the which they did 
at high-water ; of which they were very glad, for they 
had not seen each other all that day, since the morning. 

"So they made them a barricado (as usually they did 
every night) with loggs, stakes, and thike pine bowes, 
the height of a man, leaving it open to leeward, partly to 
shelter them from the could and winde (making their 
fire in the midle, and lying round aboute it), and partly 
to defend them from any sudden assaults of the sav- 
ages, if they should surround them. So being very 
weary they betooke them to rest. 

"But aboute midnight they heard a hideous and great 
erie, and their sentinell caled ^Arme, arme'; so they 
bestired them and stood to their armes, and shote a cup- 
pie of muskets, and then the noys seased. 

"They concluded it was a companie of wolves, or 
such like wild beasts ; for one of the sea men tould them 
he had often heard shuch a noyse in New-found land." 

They then lay down and went to sleep again. At 
&Ye in the morning the sentinel woke them, for the 
seamen had to be aboard the shallop at high water to 
get her out of the creek. It was still dark. So they 
woke and had prayer. Then they began to prepare 
breakfast. Some carried their muskets down to put 
them aboard the shallop, but the water was not yet high 
enough to cover the mud. So they lay the muskets on 
the bank and came back to breakfast. 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 113 

They were settling down to breakfast when "all on 
a Sudan they heard a great and strange crie." 

At once they knew that these were the voices that they 
Lad heard overnight. 

One of the men who had wandered beyond the barri- 
cade came running back to them. 

"Men," he shouted, "Indians, Indians." 

Even as he shouted a shower of arrows came flying 
among them. The men snatched up their guns. Cap- 
tain Miles Standish fired the first musket. Then an- 
other raised his piece and shot at an Indian's head that 
appeared. 

"Do not fire," said Standish to the other two, "until 
you can take full aim." 

Meanwhile the first two charged their muskets again 
with all speed ; for there were only four had guns with 
them. The other men, with their coats of mail on and 
cutlasses in their hands, dashed off down to the creek 
to get the guns that they had left on the bank. In- 
stantly, the Indians wheeled round to shoot their ar- 
rows at them. 

Seizing their guns, the men turned on their assail- 
ants and began to fire at the Indians, who turned tail, 
except one "brave." Of him William Bradford writes : 

"Yet ther was a lustie man, and no less valiante, 
stood behind a tree within halfe a musket shot, and 
let his arrows flie at them. He was seen shoot S' ar- 
rowes, which were all avoyded. He stood S- shot of 
a musket, till one taking full aime at him, and made 
the barke or splinters of the tree fly about his ears, 
after which he gave an extraordinary shrike, and away 
they wente all of them." 



114 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Leaving a few men to guard the shallop, Miles Stand- 
isli and the rest ran shouting for a quarter of a mile, 
firing a few shots, and then returned. 

Quietly the Pilgrims stood while one of them spoke 
a prayer of thanks to God for delivering them. 

They gathered up a bundle of arrows to send home 
to England. They named that place ^'The First En- 
counter." 

Almost immediately afterward the wind stiffened 
from the south-east. As the wind rose to a gale the 
sea became rougher and wilder. The skies darkened to 
a leaden grey. The enemy that they were learning to 
fear far more than the Red Indians swept down upon 
them — ^blizzards of driving snow that blinded their 
sight, and made the rigging stiff with frost and coated 
the bulwarks with snow. The rudder broke, and it was 
as much as two men could do to steer her with oars. 
The mast broke in three places ; the sail went overboard 
into the sea. 

The winter night began to come on. They would per- 
ish if they stayed out in the open. 

The man who was piloting them said, ^^Be of good 
cheer; I see the harbour," for he had been there on an 
earlier voyage as a seaman. 

Then suddenly he shouted, "Lord be merciful to us; 
my eyes never saw this place before." He lost his head, 
and was going to row into a cove full of great breakers, 
where they would have been smashed to bits. 

But a steadier sailor who had the oar in his hand 
steering shouted, ''About with her if you are men, or 
you will be cast away." 

They pulled with a will, and were soon under the 



THE ADVENTURES OF SCOUTING 115 

lea of a small island, although they did not know, till 
the morning light came, that it was an island. ■'• 

They were in a quandary. Drenched with the snow 
and with the spume of the sea, and half-frozen with the 
biting wind that still drove round them from the south- 
west, they were in misery and in danger of freezing to 
death' on the defenceless shallop. Yet to land in the 
storm in the darkness of an unknown coast that might 
be infested with Indians seemed madly dangerous. 

Clarke, the mate, however, was both a skilful seaman 
and a daring fellow. He determined, with a few oth- 
ers, to risk the landing. So they tumbled into the long- 
boat and, tossing in the darkness on the waste of waters, 
rowed toward the dark mass of the island. Clarke, who 
was in the bows of the boat, leapt ashore. So the island 
was named after him, Clarke's Island. He and the 
others gathered sticks and branches together, and, strik- 
ing flint upon steel, they managed to get a fire glowing. 

The gleam of the fire cast fitful rays through the 
darkness of the storm. The men aboard the shallop 
were freezing. As the hours drew on toward midnight 
the cold grew more and more intense. At length, unable 
longer to endure the agonies of the wet and cold, the 
other men from the shallop put out over the midnight 
sea toward the fire that leapt invitingly on the shore. 
They landed safely. 

There, through that stormy night, with what shelter 
they could make from the cold, they shivered and slept 
fitfully till dawn. The storm had by this time gone 
down. They went out aboard the shallop and repaired 

* There were two islands. They had no name then; but they are 
now called Clarke's Island and Saquish Head (see map). 



116 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

her where the raging seas and winds of the day before 
had roughly handled her. 

"Though this had been a day and night of much 
trouble and danger unto them," Bradford comments, 
"yet God gave them a morning of comforte and refresh- 
ing (as usually he doth to his children), for the next 
day was a f aire sunshininge day, and they found them- 
sellves to be on an ilande secure from the Indeans, wher 
they might drie their stufe, ^xe their peeces, and rest 
them selves, and gave God thanks for his mercies, in 
their manifould deliverances." 

It was Saturday. They decided to rest there on the 
Sunday. So they spent the day in making such shel- 
ter as they could. "On the Sabbath Day we rested," 
wrote Morton in his journal of the exploration. 

On Monday morning they set to work in earnest. 
Some sailed about the harbour and took soundings of 
the depth of the water. They found that there was good 
harbourage for large ships. Others walked away from 
the shore inland. They came upon fields where they 
could still see the stubble of the year's corn harvest 
reaped by the Indians. 

They also discovered little running brooks of fresh 
water. 

They came to the great decision that they would 
recommend to the company of the Pilgrims on the May- 
flower to settle here, "which did much comforte their 
harts." This was the harbour that they called Ply- 
mouth Harbour, naming it after the great Devon port 
from which they had sailed. And, as they set foot upon 
the great boulder by the side of which the boat was 
beached, they called it Plymouth Pock. 



CHAPTER VII 
A CLEAEmG m THE WASTE 



THE WOED OF MAmTO, THE GEEAT SPIEIT, TO 
THE EED INDIAN TEIBES 

"I have given you lands to hunt in, 
I have given you streams to fish in. 

Why then are you not contented? 
Why then will you hurt each other? 
I am weary of your quarrels, 
Weary of your wars and bloodshed. 
Weary of your prayers for vengeance. 
Of your wranglings and dissensions; 
All your strength is in your union, 
All your danger is in discord ; 
Therefore be at peace henceforward 
And as brothers live together." 

Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, 



CHAPTEK VII 
A CLEAEING IN THE WASTE 



The Pilgrim-scouts joyfully turned the bows of tlie 
shallop northward to go back from the bay that they had 
discovered to the Mayflower, She lay at anchor twenty- 
five miles away. 

The Pilgrims on board her kept an anxious look-out 
for the return of their men. William Bradford, look- 
ing out from the shallop as she ran toward the mother- 
ship, would try to catch the wave of her kerchief in the 
hand of his wife — Dorothy May — ^whom he had mar- 
ried (you remember) at Ley den seven years before. 
But he could see no wave of her hand. He and the oth- 
ers climbed aboard the Mayfloiver. Then one of the 
Pilgrims took him aside and told him how, during the 
storm while he had been away, she had fallen over- 
board. They had been unable to rescue her; and she 
had drowned. 

William Bradford could say at that hour what Oliver 
Cromwell was later to say of the loss of his son. "It 
went to my heart like a dagger ; indeed it did." But he 
took strong grip of himself, and gave his whole life to 
the great enterprise of clearing the waste for the Pil- 
grims and in that waste building the life of New Eng- 
land. 

119 



120 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

The tale of that clearing and building, and the ad- 
ventures that came in carrying it through, make up the 
rest of the story of the Pilgrims. 

The Mayflower weighed anchor and sailed for Ply- 
mouth Harbour. She had been smitten by gale and 
swept by the league-long rollers of the Atlantic. She 
was weather-beaten, and had but hardly escaped wreck. 
But she had at last reached her desired haven. 

She dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbour by 
Clarke's Island, and the boys and girls aboard her 
looked with excitement toward the shore where they 
were to live for the rest of their days. 

They had started in the Speedwell from Delfshaven 
(you remember) in July. They had hoped to have 
settled and built their new houses before winter. But 
the delays through the leaky Speedwell and the tem- 
pests had thrown them back. So that it was within a 
week of Christmas when they all set foot on the shore. ^ 

On Monday, December 18th, the men from the Mdy- 
flower, guided by the scouting party, went into the 
woods and explored the country round about. Then, 
on the following day, they walked northward.^ The 
whole body of them gathered together when they re- 
turned, and it was decided to settle on the spot by the 
Bay now called Plymouth. 

That afternoon twenty of the men with axes started 
to build a barricade of logs and tree-trunks, so that the 
Pilgrims could stay on shore after their long months 
on the Mayflower, 

*It was actually December 18tli, 1620, on the old reckoning, 
i.e. they landed on what we should call December 28th. 
^ Toward where Kingston now stands. 



A CLEARING IN THE WASTE 121 

Darkness fell before any covering conld be built 
under which they could sleep. They lay down under 
the open sky to rest through the night-time. As they 
went to rest the wind rose. It swept down upon the 
harbour in wild fury. The sea was lashed into great 
waves. One after another the three anchors of the 
Mayflower were dropped by the sailors who had stayed 
on board, but the tortured ship wrenched at her cables 
till they feared that even the three anchors would give. 

Icy rain that stung like a whip-lash swept along on 
the tempest. It beat down upon the men and women 
and boys and girls on the shore. For hour after hour 
they crouched there through the long December night, 
drenched to the skin with the rain, frozen with the 
cold ; unable to build a fire or get food. 

Dawn came, gTcy and without cheer. The storm 
raged on. The food that they had brought ashore was 
all eaten, and the shallop could not put out in the boil- 
ing waters to get more supplies. At last, however, as 
the day drew on, the tempest began to get less wild. 
The shallop put out to the Mayflower. Food was put 
into that smaller vessel, and every man or boy who 
could work tumbled into her to come ashore and hasten 
on with the building. 

Very quickly they set to work. Some of the strong- 
est made the shore ring with the sound of their axes, 
and the grinding crash of falling trees. Others in par- 
ties lopped and dragged the timber to the building 
place. 

Twenty men stayed ashore that night on guard. The 
others went back to the Mayflower. The next day was 
Sunday. They all rested. The men ashore stayed on 
guard. As they waited and watched they heard a hid- 



122 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

eous yelling. Indians in the forest were raising a war- 
cry. They hoped to frighten the Pilgrims away from 
their land. But no attack followed the outcry. 

It was Christmas Eve. 

Christmas Day dawned; but no man thought of rest 
or holiday. The threat of the Indians and the horror 
of the cold and rain in the tempestuous night told them 
that — ^unless they wished to perish from the earth — 
they must at once have shelter from the winter, and pro- 
tection from the savage Red Indians. 

On the top of the hill they levelled a space on Christ- 
mas Day — Monday. On it they built a timber gun- 
platform. They brought out in the shallop a cannon 
from the Mayfloiver, and with much toil dragged it up 
the hill and placed it on the platform to awe the In- 
dians, who — they could feel though they could not see 
— ^were watching them closely from the covert of the 
forest. 

All this time the work of building went rapidly for- 
ward. They decided first to put up a common house 
that all could use as shelter till each had his own sepa- 
rate home. This common-house they decided to use 
afterwards as a meeting-place — such as the House with 
the Green Door had been at Leyden. 

A stream ran down to the harbour. They decided 
to make that stream determine the line of their one 
street.^ In order to keep the number of houses as low 
as possible all the Pilgrims were divided up into nine- 
teen families. The unmarried men were attached to 

^The stream is now called Townbrook; the street is called 
Leiden Street, and rims from the beach and Plymouth Eock to 
the hill of the gun-platform. 




123 



124 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

different households. Each family had to build its 
own house. 

The plots for the houses and gardens were arranged 
down each side of the street by the stream. Exactly 
which family should have which plot of land was de- 
termined by drawing lots. Soon they were all at work 
with a will. They hewed down trees with their axes; 
lopped the branches from the trunks with hatchets; 
sawed the trunks into logs of the right length, and split 
the logs into thick rough planks. They also brought 
down the withes for thatching the roofs. In four days 
from beginning to build, the timber-work of the com- 
mon-house was finished, and a half of the roof was 
thatched. 

II 

Then began the darkest of all the days of the Pil- 
grims. First one and then another fell ill with a 
strange and terrible sickness. For months they had 
lived on the very poor food that could be carried on 
ship. They could, in fact, get no fresh food, save the 
fish they might catch, until the next year's harvest. 
They had been crowded in the evil-smelling closeness of 
the under-deck of the Mayflower. The tempes5;s had 
drained their remaining strength. Many of those who 
fell ill died. 

Through January and February 1621 this dreadful 
pestilence swept them down. At one time, out of the 
hundred in the company, only six or seven could crawl 
about to take food to the others. The little heroic band 
in its Pilgrim's Progress was passing through the Val- 
ley of the Shadow of Death. 



A CLEARING IN THE WASTE 125 

Tlie strong, rough soldier, Captain Miles Standisli, 
in this time of plague became like the tenderest nurse. 
He and stalwart Brewster escai)ed the pestilence, and 
were great pillars of strength to all the others. 

Quietly and in the darkness they carried those who 
died up the hill -^ and buried them there. They raised 
no monument then over the graves. They were even 
obliged to flatten the earth, so that no eye could tell 
that any one lay there. For they knew that, if they 
left the mounds of the graves visible, the Indians would 
come by stealth, and, counting the graves, would thus 
discover how many of them had died. That would have 
shown the Ked Indians that by March, out of the hun- 
dred who had reached that land, barely fifty remained 
alive. The others had died, mostly from the pestilence 
and scurvy, and, of those who still lived, some were 
women and children. So there would be few indeed 
for an armed force of Indians to swoop down upon, over- 
come, and wipe out of existence. 

In the night the boys and girls were sometimes wak- 
ened by the howling of hungry wolves in the winter 
night. The sentinels on the hill-fort saw the skulking 
forms of the wolves in the moonlight prowling among 
the tree-trunks. The wolves even dared to show their 
fangs by day ; and no child dare go far beyond the bar- 
ricade for fear of these wild beasts. The wolves be- 
came so daring and dangerous that a reward was given 
to every man who killed one. He was to cut off its head, 
nail the head to the side of the meeting-house, and pro 
claim aloud what he had done. 

'Burying Hill (see plan, page 123). It ia now, c^ed Ooleft 
Hill. 



126 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Far more terrifying, however, than the wolves were 
the swift and silent Indians who slipped along the for- 
est trails like shadows. 

Captain Miles Standish went out one day hunting. 
As he crept through the forest he found, to his surprise, 
a deer lying dead with its antlers cut off. It had been 
slain by the Indian hunters. In the very next week 
another of the Pilgrim Colony was out hunting, and 
had hidden himself to wait for the passing of the deer. 
As he stood there he saw dusky shapes stealing silently 
through the trees — not deer, but men — Red Indian war- 
riors. They were prowling along in the direction of the 
plantation. 

One day Miles Standish and Cooke, when they had 
ended their work of cutting down trees in the wood, 
left their tools. In the morning the tools had been 
carried off. On the opposite side of Townbrook, on 
the crest of the hill, two Indians suddenly appeared. 
Miles Standish and Stephen Hopkins went forward 
making signs of peace and trying to signal that they 
wished to talk with them. The Indians raced off at 
once, like the flying shadows of cloudlets on a hill-side. 

The Pilgrim colonists could see that life or death for 
them might hang on the sureness of their power of de- 
fence. They, therefore, out of their small numbers, 
bound the able-bodied men together in a little corps of 
warriors to defend their women and children. The five 
cannon from the Mayflower were dragged up the hill 
to the fort-platform. Captain Miles Standish, who was 
placed in command, set the five cannon there facing in 
different directions, so that every line of approach from 
the woods or the shore to the houses was covered. 



A CLEARING IN THE WASTE 127 



III 

The sunsliine now began to be warm at noon, and 
the songs of the birds began to sound in the woods, 
William Bradford tells us in his story of these days. 

The Pilgrims saw light at the end of the steep path 
leading out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 

The winter had passed. The pestilence had o-one. 
Spring had come. 

As the month of March was on the point of giving 
way to the sun and showers of April, a lonely and 
strange figure came out of the woods over the hill and 
down by the side of the stream between the houses. He 
was an Indian brave. His black hair was cut short 
over his brows, but hung long over his shoulders. He 
had no beard. His only clothing was a broad leather 
belt with a hanging fringe about his loins. His swarthy, 
copper-coloured skin shone in the morning sunshine. In 
one hand he gripped a bow; in the other two arrows. 
From one of the arrows the tip was broken. 

Miles Standish, John Carver, William Bradford and 
some others stood before the common-house waiting his 
coming. He strode forward without fear. He made 
as though he would go straight into the house. They, 
however, were suspicious that he might have come to 
spy upon them. So they kept him outside. 

Then he spoke to them, and to their astonishment his 
words were English. The pronunciation was strange, 
and the words sometimes curious ; but they understood 
him. This is what he told them in his broken English : 

"I am Samoset. I do not live in this part of the 
land. I am a chief of the tribe upon Monhegan. Mon- 



128 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

hegan is an island between two rivers — tlie Kennebec 
and the Penobscot. English men come there in ships 
to fish in the seas. They have taught me your English 
language. 

"I have been in this country last year/' he went on. 
"I was with an English man named Captain Dermar. 
The name of this harbour where you live is, in the lan- 
guage of the Indians, Patuxet. That means ^the Little 
Bay.' E^early fifty moons ago a plague came on this 
place. The men who lived here were slain by it. There 
was not one left of all who were there at that time. 

^The nearest people to you on the side of the setting 
sun is the tribe of Massasoit. His warriors are sixty. 
On the side of the rising sun are the N^ausets. These 
are the people who shot arrows at your men in the win- 
ter days.'' 

The Chief Samoset had come in peace. Darkness fell 
and he stayed in the little colony, and slept there that 
night. 

In the morning he spoke with them again. 

"I go," he said, '^to the Wampanoags. I will bring 
men of their tribe to you. We will bring to you skins 
of the beaver." 

Samoset departed as silently and swiftly as he had 
come. On the next day, which was Sunday, he came 
again. The boys and girls were tingling with excite- 
ment as they saw him come down to them with ^ye 
more Red Indians — braves of the Wampanoag tribe. 
They were tall men, but broad of shoulder too ; power- 
ful warriors with sinews like steel cable and eyes like 
hawks. Down the faces of some of them a band of 
black was painted from forehead to chin, the width of 
a man's hand. The faces of all were painted in differ- 



A CLEARING IN THE WASTE 129 

ent colours in stripes and curves. Their black hair, like 
Samoset's, was short over the forehead and long over 
the shoulders. Each wore over his shoulders a deer- 
skin, and on his legs were long mocassins of deer-skin 
reaching to the thighs. 

Over four hundred yards from the houses they put 
down their bows and arrows. They also carried in their 
hands the very tools that Miles Standish and Cooke 
had left in the woods in February. They brought the 
tools back to show that they wished to be friends. 

To show how friendly they were they said that they 
would sing and dance in the Indian way. But as it was 
Sunday the Pilgrims said that they did not wish it, for 
they gave that day to the worship of God. When the 
Red Indians offered to sell to them some beautiful silky 
beaver-skins, the Pilgrims gave the same reply. Then 
Samoset and his friends left the Pilgrims to the quiet 
of their Sunday worship in the common-house. 

Three days passed. On the fourth the now familiar 
form of Samoset came swinging down the street. With 
him was Tisquantum, the only man alive of all the 
tribe that had lived in the Little Bay. He was alive 
because he had been far away across the seas when the 
pestilence wiped out his tribe. 

The eyes of the Pilgrims opened in amazement as 
they heard the story of Tisquantum. 

"Seven years ago," he told them, "an Englishman 
named Thomas Hunt captured me and twenty-three 
other Indians to sell us as slaves in Spain. I escaped. 
I went on another ship to England. There in London 
I became a servant to Sir Ferdinando Gorges. I left 
him and went to serve a merchant. I know all the 
streets of London, for I lived there for jears. Then 



130 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Captain Dermar took me on his ship and brought me 
back to the land of mj tribe. When I came here, nine 
moons ago, they were not. They had all been slain by 
the pestilence. I only am left of them all." 

Samoset and Tisquantum explained that they had 
come with a message from Massasoit, the great chief 
above all the chiefs of the tribes of Pohanoket. 

"Massasoit and his warriors are near at hand," they 
said. '^He desires speech with you." 

John Carver, William Bradford and the rest saw at 
once that all their future might hang upon the feelings 
toward them of the great chief Massasoit. 

"If he becomes a friend to us/' they said to one an- 
other, "then all the tribes that are under him around 
the shores of this great bay will be our friends." 

Less than an hour later the Pilgrims saw Massasoit 
and his three-score braves on the crest of the hill that 
rises to the south of the Townbrook.^ Tisquantum came 
forward before the others. 

"Will you send a messenger over who shall speak with 
Chief Massasoit ?" he said. 

Edward Winslow, the man of travel and the scholar, 
who had joined the Pilgrims in the later years at Ley- 
den, said that he would go. He knew that it might be 
a perilous journey; but he blithely set out. He wore 
his cuirass and his sword and pistol. He also carried 
gifts for the chief. 

The boys and girls and all the other Pilgrims watched 
Edward Winslow with bated breath as he went down 
by the stream, walked across the ford, climbed the hill 

* This is now knoAvn as Watson's Hill. See plan of the 
Pljonouth Settlement, p. 123; and map on opposite page. 




131 



132 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

to its crest, and then disappeared, engulfed by tlie crowd 
of Indian warriors. 

Winslow offered his gifts to the chief. Massasoit 
stretched out his hand and fingered Winslow's sword 
and his breastplate. He desired to buy it from him. 

^^My sovereign Lord, King James of England," said 
Winslow, ^'salutes you with peace and good-will. The 
governor of our colony desires to speak with you. He 
would join in a treaty of peace with you, and desires 
that he and you should have trade with one another." 

^^I will go and speak with your governor," said Chief 
Massasoit. 

The chief told Edward Winslow to stay behind on the 
hill with forty of his braves while he, accompanied by 
twenty of his warriors, all armed, went down to the 
village to meet with Governor Carver there. Winslow 
was to stand as hostage for Massasoit. 

Captain Miles Standish, with Alderton and six other 
Pilgrims as musketeers, walked down to the stream, 
and, standing by the ford, saluted the chief as he came 
down and crossed the brook. This "guard of honour" 
then turned and marched up the street with Massasoit 
and his braves to the council-house. 

The boys and girls as they gazed at them saw which 
was the chief, because he had round his neck a big 
gleaming necklace of white bones. Eound his neck also 
was a cord from which hung the chief's hunting and 
scalping-knife. 

Massasoit's dark face was painted red. He and his 
warriors were all tall, strong men with grave faces. 
His braves had their faces painted also, all in curves 
and straight lines and crosses of white and black, red 
and yellow. Over the shoulders of some of them hung 



A CLEARING IN THE WASTE 133 

skins of deer or wolves or beaver. But some of them 
wore nothing, and the boys could see the splendid mus- 
cles of their arms and legs, strong as whipcord under the 
gleaming copper skin. 

So the Indians came to pow-wow with the White Men 
from across the sea. 

In the common-house the Pilgrims had spread such 
carpets and cushions as they had with them. Governor 
John Carver welcomed Massasoit and his men. They 
entered and sat down to eat with Carver and his council. 

When the meal was done they sat down together to 
talk of their relations with one another. These three 
things they agreed. 

First, they would not fight or hurt one another in 
any way ; secondly, if other people attacked either, then 
the other would come to his help ; thirdly, if they dif- 
fered from one another, they would come together in 
conference and come unarmed. 

It was the first treaty of the new Commonwealth that 
had been founded in the cabin of the Mayflower. It 
was a treaty of peace. And it was a peace that was 
never broken in the life-time of the white and red 
brothers who sat down in the council house that day in 
the spring of 1621, by the shores of Plymouth Bay. 



CHAPTER VIII 
BUILDEES IN THE WASTE 



VENTimiNG THE UNKNOWN WAYS 

Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the un- 
known ways, 
Pioneers! O Pioneers I 
We primeval forests felling, 
We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the 

mines within. 
We the surface broad surveying, and the virgin soil up- 
heaving, 
Pioneers! O Pioneers 1 

Walt Whitman. 



CHAPTER YIII 
BUILDEES IN THE WASTE 



The frosty rime and the icicles had long ago melted 
from the rigging of the Mayflower. 

Her captain (you remember) had wished to sail her 
back to England in the winter. But he had been 
stopped from doing this ; for the tempests had battered 
the ship's hull and torn her rigging, so that she needed 
much repair to make her seaworthy. Then the dreadful 
pestilence had smitten his crew ; the bo'sun, the gunner, 
the cook, three quartermasters, and several seamen had 
died of it. It was now spring-time, however, and the 
tempests were past ; the ship was refitted ; the pestilence 
had disappeared; the Pilgrim had made a settlement 
and built themselves homes; the treaty of peace had 
been signed with the Indians. 

One day all preparations for starting were complete. 
The Pilgrims all came down to see the Mayflower heave 
anchor and set sail for England. They were, indeed, 
very sorry to watch her making ready to leave them. 
They had no ship of their own, beyond the little shal- 
lop. They were just a few white folk on a narrow plot 
of land in a vast waste of forest peopled with Red In- 
dians. To walk to their nearest white neighbours would 
take about a month. For there was no one save them- 

137 



138 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

selves between the French Settlement in I^ova Scotia 
and the English Settlement in Virginia — a thousand 
miles of coast-line on which they formed the only tiny 
outpost of white men from across the seas. 

The captain gave his order; the sailors with a "Yo- 
heave-ho'' raised the anchor. The sails were hoisted. 
The Mayflower began to gather way. Kerchiefs flut- 
tered; last messages were shouted. 

The PilgTims left the beach and climbed the little 
hill by the community-church. They gazed and gazed, 
with eyes half-blurred with reluctant tears, till the glim- 
mer of her sails had gone and their last link with the 
homeland was snapped. It was April 5th, 1621. 

In that same month, when all were busy in the fields, 
ploughing and harrowing the soil, and sowing the seed, 
John Carver, the Governor, came in one day from the 
corn-field. 

"I have a great pain in my head," he said. 

His wife, Katherine, bade him lie down to rest. He 
lay down. He never rose from his bed or spoke again. He 
was buried a few days later on the high ground looking 
out over the sea. His wife loved him so dearly that she 
could not live on without him ; she died six weeks later. 

The little colony of Pilgrims must at once have an- 
other Governor to succeed John Carver. Who should 
it be? William Brewster, round whom they had gath- 
ered in the old days at Scrooby,^ was their elder and 
teacher; he could not take on his shoulders the burden 
of being Governor as well. His younger friend, 
William Bradford, who had stood by Brewster's side 
from the beginning, and who was a brave man of wis- 
dom, decision, and resource, was chosen by the vote of 

^ See Chapters I and II. 



BUILDERS IN THE WASTE 139 

all to be Governor. On his broad shoulders, for those 
great first years, lay the burden of building in the waste 
a strong colony. Isaac Allerton became his assistant. 

Meanwhile they were all as busy as bees in the fields. 
Tisquantum, their Red Indian friend, told them how to 
sow the seed and manure and tend the young plants. 

^When the young leaves of the oak-tree are just as 
big as the ears of a mouse," he said, "you should sow 
the Indian corn. When the plant begins to grow you go 
out into the bay and catch the little fish [the fish is 
called "ale-wives" ^] and put them in the ground by the 
roots of the maize. Then the plant will grow well." 

While most of the Pilgrims were sowing the seed, 
others with their axes were felling the trees in the woods 
and building houses of the logs. Every now and then 
a few went off into the woods with muskets and powder- 
horns to hunt deer for their food. Others went out 
with nets in the shallop, and in the great bay would 
catch fish for the housewives to cook for them. 

There were only twenty-one men and six sturdy boys 
remaining alive after the pestilence. But by working 
hard they were able to prepare and sow twenty-one acres 
with Indian corn; six acres were planted with wheat, 
barley, and rye. And each house had its own little 
garden for flowers and vegetables. 

II 

William Bradford now between the planting and the 
harvest determined to carry further his understanding 

^The Indian word is really "aloofe." The fish is about a foot 
in length and is like a shad, common on the east coast of North 
America. 



140 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

with the Red Indian tribes round about the colony. He 
asked Edward Winslow, the scholar and traveller, and 
Stephen Hopkins, the man whose baby Oceanus was 
born in the Mayflower on the voyage, to be ambassadors. 
Tisquantum was to be their interpreter. 

They started out one day in the direction of the 
villages of Chief Massasoit, with whom they had signed 
the treaty earlier in the year.^ They walked through 
the woods and over the hills, when they came by the 
rapids of a river. There they saw on the bank an 
Indian village called Namasket. 

The Indians in this village treated them as friends 
and gave them food. Refreshed by this rest on the way, 
they started again up the river-bank and walked along 
by the rolling waters for a further ^yq miles. There 
they saw more canoes on the water and wigwams on 
the shore belonging to the same tribe as the village of 
Namasket. 

It was now sunset; so they slept there that night. 

Starting out again in the morning, they walked on 
through the forenoon until in the early afternoon they 
came into the lands over which Massasoit ruled. This 
was the land of the Wampanoag tribe. By the time 
sunset had come again, Winslow and Hopkins had 
trudged many miles through Massasoit's territory. They 
came at last, as darkness fell, to his principal village, 
called Sowams.^ 

Chief Massasoit and his braves welcomed the white 
ambassadors among their wigwams. Winslow and 
Hopkins were placed by his side, and the three sat 
facing the circle of Indian faces, with the keen but 

^See Chapter VII. 

^ Now Warren, on tbe shore of Narrangansett Bay. 



BUILDERS IN THE WASTE 141 

inscrutable eyes of the braves lighted up by the camp- 
fire. 

The two white men brought out from their bundles 
a bright-coloured soldier's coat from England, trimmed 
with lace. They also held in their hands a copper chain 
beautifully ornamented. A medal hung from the chain. 

"Dress yourself in this coat," they said to Massasoit, 
"and put the chain about your neck.'' 

Massasoit at once put on the gay coat and gleaming 
copper chain. His braves stood round \7ith their faces 
aglow with wonder and admiration. 

Chief Massasoit then made a long speech. The braves 
grunted their applause. Tisquantum translated the 
speech into English for Winslow and Hopkins. Then 
they all sat down together and the chief with his Eng- 
lish friends smoked the pipe of peace together through 
the evening. 

As they talked Winslow said to the chief: 

"When we landed on the shore last winter we found 
corn buried in the sand.^ We wish to find out who 
owned that com so that we may repay him for it." 

The chief nodded and said that he would find out 
for them. 

At last the time came for going to bed. To their 
astonishment and dismay Hopkins and Winslow found 
that they had to try to sleep on the ground on the same 
bed with the chief, his wife, and two of his principal 
braves. The bed was made of rough boards on which 
a mat was spread. Winslow, writing about this ex- 
perience, said: 

"I was more wearied with the bed than with the 
journey." 

*See Chapter VI. 



142 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

They stayed with Massasoit through the next day 
and the following night. He asked them to stay longer 
still; but they decided that it was time for them to 
turn their faces toward Plymouth Bay. So they said 
their ^'Farewells" to the chief and his men, and, turning 
their hacks on the wigwams of the Wampanoags, they 
plunged into the forests on the long trail homeward. 
In order to see the country thoroughly, they came back 
over a different route. 

They were filled with horror, as they passed under 
the broad-spreading branches of the forests of chestnut 
and oak, beech and walnut trees, and by the banks of the 
beautiful streams, to see the bones of thousands of In- 
dians whitening in the spring sunshine. The pestilence 
that had slain scores of the Pilgrims in the previous 
winter had carried off thousands of the Indians all 
across the land. 

At last, all weary with long travel on foot, Winslow 
and Hopkins came over the ridge of the hill at Ply- 
mouth and strode down to the stream by the banks of 
which their own log-houses were built. They were as 
glad to be home, where they could rest, as their friends 
were to welcome them back from the perils of wan- 
dering among strange tribes of red men. 

One day, about this same time, the cry went out that 
a boy was missing. The son of one of the settlers, he 
had wandered away from the little town and lost him- 
self in the forest. He tried to find his way home, but 
all round him stood the trunks of thousands of trees. 
He had not learned, like the Indians, to guide himseK 
through the woods by watching the sun for his direc- 
tion. He did not know that the moss only grew on one 
side of the trees. So he went on and on. He cried out, 



BUILDERS IN THE WASTE 143 

but no voice answered save the call of a bird in the 
woods. The sun set; the darkness came down; he was 
tired and hungry and frightened. He took some berries 
from a bush and ate them ; and then, in sheer weariness, 
he lay down on the ground and slept. 

In the morning he woke and ate some more berries. 
All day he wandered trying to find his way home ; but 
he did not meet any man — red or white. He began to 
feel that he would never see home or friends again. It 
seemed as though the whole world was covered with 
trees. Darkness fell again, and again he slept through 
the lonely night, with only the sough of the wind in the 
trees to talk to him if he waked and all around him 
the silence and solitude of the trackless forests. 

For five days the boy wandered on; for four nights 
he slept under the boughs beneath the open sky. At 
last he saw a gleam of blue sea and yellow sand through 
the tree-trunks. In a few moments he was out on the 
beach, with the sea stretching away before him in the 
spring sunshine. 

But, even now, he did not know where he was, or 
how he could get back to his home; for all the beach 
was strange to him. He was — though he did not know 
it — twenty miles away from home, at the head of Buz- 
zard's Bay. He wandered on again. Then he saw 
moving forms. They were men. 

At last he saw that they were Red Indians. Would 
they scalp him; would they torture him by fire at the 
stake as a prisoner ? In any case, it was useless to run. 
They surrounded him and took him with them to their 
wigwams. 

The Indians were of the !N"anset tribe. They had 
not signed any truce with the Pilgrims as Chief Massa- 



144 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

soit had. But they were kind to the boy. They took 
him and fed him and he slept in one of their wigwams. 

The great chief of the Nansets was called Aspinet 
Word passed from him along the forest tracks to Massa- 
soit that the boy was in his tribe. Massasoit sent the 
news on to William Bradford at Plymouth. 

At once Bradford consulted with his friends, and they 
decided to send ten of the younger men of the Pilgrims 
to rescue the boy. They fitted out the shallop with pro- 
visions and armed themselves with muskets, corselets, 
and the rest. The shallop set sail for Buzzard's Bay. 
The little ship scudded across the water and anchored 
off the land near the home of Aspinet, the great-chief 
of the E^anset tribe. 

Landing, but leaving a guard on the boat, they 
plunged up the beach into the woods till the smoke 
iind the wigwams of Aspinet came in sight through the 
trees. The chief had already, through his scouts, heard 
of their coming. He waited gravely for the white men. 
Around him were a full hundred warriors — his body- 
guard of braves. The boy was in the midst of them. 

Aspinet was friendly to them. His squaws had fed 
the boy. Now he hung round the boy's neck great 
necklaces of coloured beads. Then he led him to the 
white men. They were full of joy at having found 
the son who was lost. We can imagine how excited 
he himself was as he trudged back with them to the 
beach, answering their thousand questions about his 
adventures; and how hfs mother would be waiting by 
the shore at Plymouth for the shallop to come back. 
The other boys would envy him his adventures, as he 
told them the story of the days and nights in the woods 
and among the Indians. But we do not hear that any 



BUILDERS IN THE WASTE 145 

more of the boys went and lost themselves in the lonely, 
pathless forests. 

Ill 

The spring of 1621 passed on to summer, and the 
time of harvesting. In August strange and disturbing 
news came to William Bradford and his counsellors at 
Plymouth. 

^^Corbitant," said the rumours, "who is the high- 
chief of the Pocasset Indians, is making himself an 
enemy to us. He has captured Massasoit. He is trying 
to win the tribes around to be the enemies of the white 
man." 

"We must send Tisquantum to Namasket," said 
Bradford, "in order to find out whether the stories are 
true." 

So Tisquantum set out with another Indian named 
Hobomok to discover what had really happened. The 
two dusky forms glided swiftly out of Plymouth and 
struck the trail for ^amasket. They had gone a good 
way on their journey when other Indians suddenly leapt 
out from ambush and took them prisoners. These were 
Corbitant's braves. 

Tisquantum and Hobomok were led into the village 
of Corbitant. The chief knew that Tisquantum was 
the white men's interpreter. It was through him that 
the treaties were signed with Massasoil. Chief Corbit- 
ant stood up and drew his hunting-knife. He walked 
towards Tisquantum. 

"This man is the tongue of the white men," he said. 
"When he dies they have lost their speech." 

He held the knife at Tisquantum's breast. Every 
eye was turned on the chief and the prisoner. It was 



146 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Hobomok's opportunity. He slipped silently as a 
shadow away from his guards, and, before an alarm 
could be sounded, leapt into the woods and fled back 
along the trail to the Plymouth Settlement. 

He told the story to Bradford, who sent messages 
hurrying to call a council of war. Bradford and Miles 
Standish knew at once what must be done. 

^^If we stand by our ally Massasoit," they argued, 
^'then the Indians will know that we mean what we 
say. If we desert him, no other tribe will ever ally 
itself with us." 

It was late: nothing could be done that night. 

Miles Standish called together ten of the PilgTims. 
By morning they had provisioned and armed them- 
selves. They started. Their orders were that if Chief 
Corbitant had slain Tisquantum, he should be beheaded. 
Yet they were only eleven men going to face a tribe 
which numbered many hundred braves. Miles Standish 
and his men marched forward through the forest trails, 
led by Hobomok. At last they came to the outskirts 
of Corbitant's village. They boldly walked forward 
among the wigwams. The chief had fled. And Tis- 
quantum came out unharmed to greet them. 

This courage and the firm good faith of William 
Bradford and Miles Standish and the others had a won- 
derful and immediate effect. The news spread far and 
wide along the Indian trails from tribe to tribe. Aspinet 
(who had given back the white boy to his people), 
Canacum of Manomet, and six other chiefs at once sent 
in saying that they wished to be allies with the Pilgrims. 
They all signed treaties saying that they would be faith- 
ful subjects of King James. Even Chief Corbitant 



BUILDERS IN THE WASTE 147 

asked the other Indians to make his peace with the 
white men. 

Bradford's wise and energetic mind looked farther 
afield still. Northward lay the rich land of the tribes 
of the Massachusett Indians. So he again sent men 
aboard the shallop to sail northward. They came to a 
lovely harbour with forty-seven islands in it. As the 
shallop tacked her way to and fro between these beauti- 
ful islands with their wooded shores/ the Pilgrims 
almost wished that they had settled here rather than in 
the smaller and less protected harbour of Plymouth. 

The men on the shallop had been warned that the In- 
dians in this region were enemies. So they were pre- 
pared for treachery or for war. But when they landed 
and met the Indians they were friendly. The Pilgrims 
bought soft dark-brown beaver-skins from them; these 
were to be sent home to Britain. 

So they put out once more in the shallop full of con- 
tent. Their wise Governor Bradford (they could tell 
one another) had led them to build the strongest defence 
in the world — friendship with the peoples round about. 
!Nearly all the Indians for many, many miles were now 
the allies of the brave Pilgrims. So Governor Brad- 
ford was building in the waste places by his wise, strong, 
free government, the first rough beginnings of a new 
commonwealth. 

Night fell on the little ship, but not darkness. For 
the full, round, yellow harvest moon rose above the 
water and the islands, and shone upon them as they went 
sailing over the enchanted seas back to the little settle- 
ment of log-houses that they called home. 

In the silence of the night, with only the whisper 
* Afterwards called Boston Harbour. 



148 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

of the water lapping the moving bows of the shallop, 
thej would be sure to sing some of those chanted 
melodies of theirs to the quaint words that we find in 
the book thej had from the days of Amsterdam ^ on- 
wards. Under the harvest moon, as they thought of 
how they had come, through tempest and want, to calm 
and harvest and the friendship of the Indians, they 
might well sing praise to God. 

The swelling seas thou doest asswage, 
and make their streames full still: 

Thou doest refrayne the peoples' rage, 
and rule them at thy will 

Thou deckst the earth of thy good grace, 

with f ayre and pleasaunt crop : 
Thy cloudes distill their dew apace, 

great plenty they do drop. 

Whereby the desert shall begyn, 

full great increase to bryng: 
The little hilles shall joy therein; 

much fruite in them shall spryng. 
In places playne the flocke shall feede, 

and cover all the earth; 
The vallyes with come shall so exceede; 

that men shall sing for myrth. 

* Psalm 65 (Ixv.). The BooTce of Psalmes; collected into Eng- 
lish mfieter, by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and others. 



CHAPTEK IX 

GEEATHEAET, MR STANDFAST A:N^D 
VALIANT-EOK-TRUTH 



GEEATHEAET AND GIANT DESPAIK 

"So Mr. Greatheart, old Honest, and the four young men 
went to go up to Doubting Castle, to look for Giant Despair. 

"When they came at the castle gate they knocked for en- 
trance with an unusual noise. At that the old giant comes 
to the gate, and Diffidence his wife follows. Then said he, 
Who and what is he that is so hardy, as after this manner 
to molest the Giant Despair? Mr. Greatheart replied, ^It is 
I, Greatheart, one of the King of the Celestial Country's 
conductors of pilgrims to their place; and I demand of thee 
that thou open thy gates for my entrance. Prepare thyself 
also to fight, for I am come to take away thy head, and to 
demolish Doubting Castle.' 

"Now Giant Despair, because he was a giant, thought no 
man could overcome him; and again thought he, Since here- 
tofore I have made a conquest of angels, shall Greatheart 
make me afraid? So he harnessed himself, and went out. 
He had a cap of steel upon his head, a breast-plate of fire 
girded to him, and he came out in iron shoes, with a great 
club in his hand. Then these six men made up to him, and 
beset him behind and before; also when Diffidence the 
giantess came up to help him, old Mr. Honest cut her down 
at one blow. Then they fought for their lives, and Giant 
Despair was brought down to the ground, but was very loath 
to die. He struggled hard, and had, as they say, as many 
lives as a cat; but Greatheart was his death, for he left him 
not till he had severed his head from his shoulders. Then 
they fell to demolishing Doubting Castle, and that, you 
know, might with ease be done, since Giant Despair was 
dead." 

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, 



CHAPTEE IX 

GREATHEART, MR. STANDFAST, ANB 
VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH 



The harvest moon, under which Miles Standish and 
his men sailed home, waned to a silver sickle of light 
in the sky, and late summer turned to early autumn. 
The Pilgrims brought in their sheaves to the bams, 
they sang their chants of harvest thanksgiving, they 
rested for a little after the long toil of sowing, tending, 
and reaping. 

They called in some of their Red Indian friends to 
share their gladness. Chief Massasoit came with ninety 
of his counsellors and braves, and rejoiced with the 
Pilgrims for three days. They danced some of their 
war-dances to amuse the boys and girls and men and 
women of the settlement. Captain Miles Standish 
paraded his men and fired his cannon to entertain — 
as well as to impress — ^their Indian guests. They 
hunted in the woods. The Indians and white men to- 
gether slew ^Ye deer to help the provisioning of the 
people for the winter. 

The autumn glided on: it was now a year since the 
Mayflower had dropped anchor in Plymouth Bay. 

The Pilgrims were gradually being led past their 
difficulties and perils. Just as, in The Pilgrim's 

151 



152 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Progress, Greatheart, Mr. Standfast, and Valiant-for- 
Truth lead the Pilgrims over perilous paths, figiit with 
Giant Despair, and break down Doubting Castle, so 
the Pilgrims of the Mayflower at Plymouth were led by 
their Greatheart, William Bradford, their Mr. Stand- 
fast, William Brewster, and their Valiant-for-Truth, 
Captain Miles Standish. They had already come, 
through their Valley of the Shadow of Death, the 
pestilence; they had also climbed the Hill Difficulty; 
yet dangers and adventures still lay before them. 

II 

One day in November an Indian of the ifsTanset tribe 
came running through the woods into the street of 
Plymouth. He sought Governor Bradford, and said 
to him : 

^' There is a ship from over the seas sailing in from 
the ocean round Cape Cod." 

In a moment all was excitement. They were not ex- 
pecting any ship from England till after the winter 
should have passed and the spring come again. They 
remembered that France was fighting in war against 
England. Was this a French ship — come, perhaps, as 
an enemy against them? 

The hollow roar of a cannon broke the silence. Cap- 
tain Miles Standish had at once given the order to fire 
one of the guns of the battery as a signal to call the 
people in from the fields. Each man in the tiny force 
of the Pilgrims shouldered his musket and peered out 
to catch the first glimpse of the approaching ship. 

At last a cry went up that she flew the English flag. 
The muskets were put aside. The Pilgrims crowded 



GREATHEART 153 

down the street to the shore to watch her come in. Soon 
the boys could see the word Fortune painted on her 
bows. William Brewster caught sight of the face of a 
boy who was very dear to him. His own eldest son was 
aboard. Edward Winslow saw his brother John stand- 
ing on deck. The Fortune had brought in all thirty-five 
new Pilgrims; so there was great rejoicing. 

The Pilgrims were very sorry, however, that the 
Fortune had not brought them supplies of seed and 
other stores. Edward Winslow wrote a long letter to 
go back in the ship to England. In it he asked his 
"loving and old frienl^" George Morton to be sure that, 
when the next vessel came out, each settler should bring 
with him bedding, stout clothes to wear, a musket or a 
fowling-piece "long in the barrel,'^ much gunpowder 
and shot, and stout paper and linseed-oil for making 
windows (for there was no glass to be got). The people 
in England seemed to forgeT, when sailing out to the 
new world, that the nearest shop to the Plymouth Settle- 
ment was five hundred miles away, and that every piece 
of cloth or thread or gun or book must come across the 
seas from England. 

Nor were all the men who had come aboard the 
Fortune of the sort that helped the colony. Some came 
just burning for adventure, hating all control over their 
rough wills, restless rovers ; as Bradford said, "most of 
them were lusty yong men, and many of them wild 
enough, who litle considered whither, or aboute what 
they wente." 

"So," Bradford goes on, "they were all landed; but 
there was not so much as bisket, cake or any other 
victialls for them, neither had they any beding, but 
some sory things they had in their cabins, nor pot, nor 



154. THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

pan, to drese any meat in ; nor over many cloathes. . . ." 
Governor Bradford got his people together and they 
packed beaver and other skins, sassafras and seasoned 
boards "as full as she conld stowe," in the hull of the 
Fortune to take back with her on her homeward journey. 
So she hove anchor and hoisted sail and, turning her 
bows Eastward, made her course for England. 

She sailed for many days, and at last the coast of 
England could be seen by a sailor from the mast-head. 
But just then a fast-sailing French ship came racing 
through the water. She soon overhauled the Fortune, 
which had to heave to and let the French officers come 
aboard. 

All the ship's company of the Fortune found them- 
selves prisoners of war. In a fortnight the ship and 
her crew and passengers were set free to go home to 
England. But the cargo — the beaver-skins and all the 
rest for which the Pilgrims had toiled and sailed and 
bargained — was taken by the French and never seen 
again. So the money that was to have come from the 
sale of the cargo in order to pay the debts of the Pil- 
grims to those who had equipped them at the first was 
lost. 

Ill 

The winter passed, and the spring of another year — 
1622 — came with the song of birds and the bursting 
of the little buds of oak-leaf and the chestnut blossom 
and the sowing of new seed in the earth. 

One day, however, in April, an Indian brave came 
loping down the trail from the Narragansett tribes. In 
his hand was a sheaf of arrows. Round the arrows was 



GREATHEART 155 

the skin of a rattlesnake. The Indian brave wa8 
brought before the young Governor Bradford. 

^^What does this mean ?" Bradford asked Tisquantum, 
his Indian interpreter. 

^'The rattlesnake and the sheaf of arrows mean that 
Canonicus, the chief of the ISTarragansetts, threatens you 
with war/' said Tisquantum. 

Governor Bradford's face grew stern. 

He took the rattlesnake skin and stuffed it full with 
shot. 

As he tells us, he "sente the sneake skine back with 
"btilits in it." 

"Take that to the chief," he said to another mes- 
senger, "and with it take this letter." 

The letter, Bradford tells us, was "a round answere, 
that if they had rather have warre than peace, they 
might begine when they would ; they had done them no 
wrong, neither did they fear them, nor should they find 
them unprovided." 

The letter warned Canonicus of the dire trouble that 
would come upon him if he dared to try to make war 
upon the Plymouth Settlement. 

The messenger carried the rattlesnake to his chief 
and the letter ; but Canonicus was terrified of the white 
man's message and his "bulits." He would not receive 
them. So the messenger went back with it at last to 
Bradford himself. 

While this was happening dreadful news came up 
from Virginia in the south, where English men had 
made a settlement when Queen Elizabeth was on the 
throne. It was called Virginia after her, for she was 
named "the Virgin Queen." The Indians there had 
come in stealthily with tomahawks, bows and arrows 



156 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

and knives npon the unsuspecting British and had 
massacred all save one of the three hundred and forty- 
eight men and women, boys and girls. 

Bradford was (as we have seen) a strong man of 
decisive action; alongside him was that courageous and 
wise warrior, Captain Miles Standish. Immediately 
they decided that — even if the sowing of the seed were 
delayed — they must have protection against the plots 
of the Indians. The men went out with axes and 
hewed down trees, cutting them up into thousands of 
logs and making spiked bars. 

For day after day they laboured till even their strong 
arms were weary with the hewing and sawing, and their 
broad backs ached with the labour of log-bearing and 
driving the stakes into the ground. But in five weeks 
there ran a strong, high, firm pallisade from the shore, 
all round by the north, past the crest of Fort Hill and 
down to Town Brook. Four bastions jutted out, from 
the points of which the Pilgrims could direct a fire on 
the flanks of any Indians who might be trying to burn 
down or attack the pallisade. 

About this time Bradford and Miles Standish began 
to fear that Tisquantum was playing them false. This 
wily Indian, it appears, discovering that the tribes 
round about thought that he had great influence with 
Bradford, would tell the chiefs like Aspinet or Corbit- 
ant, that Bradford and Standish were going to make 
war upon them. The chiefs would then offer to give 
him presents if he would persuade the Governor of Ply- 
mouth and his Captain not to attack them. Tisquantum 
would promise to do this, and — as Bradford had never 
intended to attack them at all — the Indian interpreter 



GREATHEART 157 

would soon be able to say that be bad made peace and 
would ask for tbe present to be given to bim. 

Anotber wicked work t£at Tisquantum did was to 
make trade out of tbe ignorance of tbe Indians by de- 
claring tbat tbe wbite men could send plagues upon 
tbem. 

'^Tbese pale-faces/' be would say to a village of In- 
dians, ''bave magic. Tbey bave buried tbe plague under 
tbeir store-bouse. Witbout moving a step from tbeir 
bome tbey can bring fortb tbe plague and send it upon 
people and sweep tbem all away to deatb/' 

^'Ugb! Ugb!" tbe listening braves would grunt and 
give to Tisquantum presents of beaver or wolf skin so 
tbat be sbould stay tbe plague of tbe palefaces. 

One day Tisquantum told tbe otber Indian named 
Hobomok wbo lived in tbe Plymoutb Settlement tbat 
a bole in tbe ground in tbe Governor's bouse was tbe 
place wbere tbe plague was buried. 

Hobomok went to one of tbe settlers to ask if tbis 
were true. 

^'No/' said tbe trutbful Pilgrim, "we bave not tbe 
plague at our command." 

Hobomok was very angry to know bow Tisquantura 
bad lied, and so were tbe settlers. Massasoit and 
Hobomok wisbed to bave Tisquantum put to deatb : but 
William Bradford did not wisb tbem to be so bard upon 
bim. Bradford witb difficulty kept bim from being 
slain by Massasoit. 

Massasoit came to Bradford "mad witb rage," says 
Winslow, asking for Tisquantum to be killed. He of- 
fered Bradford many beaver-skins if be would kill 
Tisquantum. Bradford said tbat it was not tbe man- 
ner of Englisb people to sell people's lives. 



158 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

Massasoit went away very angry. He sent his knife 
by. a messenger saying that it was to be used for cutting 
off Tisquantum's head and his hands, which were to be 
sent to the chief. 

Tisquantum learnt his lesson: he became faithful, 
and started to ^Valk more squarely, and cleave unto 
the English till he died," which he did in the next year 
in the autumn of 1622, after an illness in which Gov- 
ernor Bradford nursed him tenderly. Tisquantum 
asked Bradford to pray for him that his soul might go 
to the God in heaven, whom the pale-faces worshipped. 

IV 

The alarms about the Indians and the busy hours of 
building the pallisade and of training a troop of de- 
fenders of the Pilgrim Settlement crowded the spring- 
time of sowing and planting with more work than the 
colonists could well compass. 

In the next five months creeping calamity came re- 
lentlessly upon them. In the winter (you remember) 
the thirty-five new colonists had come on the Fortune 
without bringing provisions from England. This made 
thirty-five new mouths to feed from the all too scanty 
stores locked up in the common storehouse of the com- 
munity. As though this were not enough, a man named 
Weston in England, who had grumbled terribly at the 
Pilgrims in a letter that he sent on the Fortune, now 
despatched seven more men in a shallop that belonged 
to a fishing vessel that he owned, with another grumbling 
letter. This brought still lower their meagre pro^ 
visions. 

"All this," said Governor Bradford, "was but could 



GREATHEART 159 

comfort to fill their hungrie bellies.'' And lie added, 
with humorous anger, 'Tut not your trust in princes 
(much less in marchants) !" 

The young com was springing in the fields, but it 
would be months before it could be reaped. The log- 
houses where the corn of the last harvest was stored 
were nearly empty. So they could not make bread. 
They had no meat. The wild-fowl had gone north. 
They had no strong nets for the deeper fishing that 
would have caught the cod in the bay or the bass that 
swam in the outer harbour. There were no vegetables. 
Practically their only food that summer was shell- 
fish. 

Even with this dreadful shortage there came a 
further scourge in the form of a gang of sixty men 
whom Weston sent from England on two emigrant ships. 
Some of them were wild desperadoes. None of them 
were of the type of men who would brook control. 

They were hungry; they saw in the fields the green 
ears of the corn that was to feed the Pilgrims through 
the coming winter. So they went into the fields and 
robbed them right and left, roasting the green ears of 
corn and eating them greedily. Governor Bradford' 
had some of the men soundly whipped publicly for this ; 
but still the thieving went on. 

The Pilgrim-colony would have been starved to death 
had not the two emigrant-ships by good fortune come 
back and taken away most of these sixty wretches. They 
left behind some of their men who were ill, the de- 
vastated fields, and the memory of a scapegrace crew. 

Still deeper suffering was to come through these 
wastrels. They sailed away from the Plymouth Settle- 



160 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

ment to Wessagnsset, on Boston Bay, farther north on 
the same coast, to make a colony there. 

They had a Governor, but they did not obey him. 
They had no Greatheart or Standfast or Valiant to 
lead them. Each man lived for himself. They did not 
know that the only true liberty is the ordered freedom 
of men who agree together to obey just laws. They did 
not fear or love God, or obey man, or work together. 
So, as we shall see, they would surely have perished 
under the tomahawks of the Indians, had not the Pil- 
grims' Greatheart and Valiant-for-Truth come to their 
rescue. 

They not only ate up all their stores, they even fed 
on their seed-corn, so that there was none to sow in the 
ground for the next harvest. So these wild settlers 
grew more and more hungry till at last some of them 
even went and hired themselves as servants to the Rea 
Indians. You would see a white man with ragged 
clothes hanging about his gaunt, half-starved body, 
carrying water and chopping wood for the Redskins. 
An Indian would put into the white man's cap a few 
handfuls of corn as wages for this work. 

^'They are squaws," one Indian brave would say to 
another. 

^^Ugh !" would come the grunt of agreement. 

Then some of the wild settlers crept out secretly and 
raided the Indians' corn. The Indians were very 
angry and refused to let them have corn, even if they 
worked for it. 

One night, when the settlers had promised that no 
more robbing of the Indian fields should take place, a 
white settler went quietly out into the fields and began 
to steal the corn. Unseen by him, shadowy forms crept 



GREATHEART l6l 

up and suddenly leapt upon him. The Indians had 
captured the thief. 

Mad with rage, they dragged him back to their vil- 
lage, and in the morning took him to the white settle- 
ment at Wessagusset. 

The Indians were so angry that the white men had 
to take their own companion — the thief — and hang him. 

"They became," says William Bradford, "con- 
temned and scorned of the Indians, and they begane 
greatly to insulte over them in a most insolente maner ; 
insomuch, many times as they lay thus scatered abrod, 
and had set on a pot with ground-nuts or shell-fish, 
when it was ready the In deans would come and eate 
it up; and when night came, whereas some of them 
had a sorie blanket, or shuch like, to lappe themselves 
in, the Indeans would take it and let the other lye all 
night in the could, so as their condition was very 
lamentable." 

These desperate men were at last at the extremity; 
they must, it seemed, either fight the Indians for com 
or starve to death. 

Giant Despair had them in his grip. They turned 
to Greatheart to know what he would do. They sent 
a messenger to Governor Bradford for advice and for 
help. 

"A small pack'' of Indians went after him to try to 
slay him on the way, so that the message should never 
reach Bradford. "Though he knew not a foote of the 
way, yet," Bradford tells us, "he got safe hither; but 
lost his way, which was well for him, for he was 
pursued, and so was mist." 

Bradford called all the Pilgrims together for counsel 
in the log-house on the hill, which was their tiny Senate- 



162 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

house. Bradford himself had very little corn left, for 
those Wessagusset settlers — you remember — had eaten 
much of it. They were living to a large extent on nuts 
and shell-fish. 

The Pilgrim Council meeting sent a message back to 
Wessagusset to say that if the settlers robbed the In- 
dians they would surely suffer, for the corn that they 
stole would last a very little time, and when it was 
eaten they would simply starve, surrounded by enemies. 
The settlers by this time had sold most of their clothes 
to the Indians. Half-naked, half-starved, a pitiful 
picture of misery and contempt — they crept wearily 
along the beach looking for shell-fish among the rocks. 

While they were in this strait, secret plots were being 
woven among the Indian tribes. 

^^The pale-faces are weak," said one chief to an- 
other. ^^Let us slay them all and keep the land for the 
red man — we will kill the men here at Wessagusset and 
also the Pilgrims at Plymouth." 

They decided that they must kill the Pilgrims as 
well, because they felt sure that the "pale-faces" would 
stand by one another in any case. 

Seven tribes leagued with the N'eponset Indians to 
slay the white men. They then sent a messenger to 
Chief Massasoit, the friend of Bradford, to ask him to 
join in the plot. 

ISTow it so happened that at this very time Massasoit 
was ill. Bradford had heard of his sickness and sent 
Edward Winslow again to visit him. 

Winslow went with Hobomok, the Indian interpreter, 
along the Indian trail through the woods till he came 
to Massasoit's village. As he came near the great chiefs 
wigwam Winslow heard (as he says) "such hellish noise 



GREATHEART 163 

as distempered us that were well, and therefore unlike 
to ease him that was sick." 

Massasoit lay on the floor in his wigwam on his mat- 
bed. The powahs (or witch-doctors) pranced round 
yelling fiendish incantations and charms to ward off or 
frighten away the evil spirits. The noise itself was al- 
most enough to kill the sick chief. For two days Massa- 
soit had not slept. All the sight had gone from his eyes. 
It seemed certain that he would die. 

Massasoit, however, weak as he was, could under- 
stand that Winslow had come. He asked for him {o be 
brought into the wigwam. Winslow came in ; he drove 
out the wild, shrieking crowd and commanded quiet. 

He gave the Indian chief a dose of one of the simple 
medicines that he had brought with him. Gradually 
Massasoit dropped off into a quiet sleep. For hours he 
lay in slumber, while Winslow made the people remain 
quiet in the village. At last he woke; his sight re- 
turned; he was better. In a short time Massasoit rose 
from the bed which he had never expected to leave till 
he died. 

"Now I see,'' said he, '^the English are my friends 
and love me. While I live I will never forget this kind- 
ness that they have shown to me." 

The sun had only set once before Massasoit repaid 
in full all the kindness that he owed. Winslow and 
Hobomok were just leaving the wigwams of the tribe to 
go back to Plymouth when Massasoit took Hobomok 
aside. 

"I tell you now," said he, "something that you must 
tell the pale-face English friend as he walks with you." 

Hobomok grunted his assent. 

"The tribe of the Il^eponsets," went on Massasoit, 



164 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

^^have joined with seven other tribes to massacre all 
the pale-faces both at Plymouth and at Wessagusset. 
They have asked me to join with them. This is my 
word to the men of Plymouth — that they go to Wessa- 
gusset to the Neponset tribe — for they are the men who 
have made this plot — and seize and slay the braves 
there. If they do not do this all the sixty pale-faces at 
Wessagusset will be scalped, and then the Indians will 
come against you also." 

As Hobomok and Winslow walked back along the 
forest-trail homeward the Indian told his friend the 
story. They quickened their steps to hurry with the 
warning to Plymouth. They told Governor Bradford of 
the Indian plot. He called together the men of all the 
tov^m. 

^'You remember," he said, "how the Indians 
massacred the English at Virginia last year. It is cer- 
tain, from the words of Massasoit, that they wish to do 
the same to us. My judgment is that Captain Standish 
must go with our men armed in the shallop to Wessa- 
gusset. They must go as traders. But they must go 
prepared to strike at the chief Indian conspirators." 

To this all agreed. 

Captain Standish chose his men, and in the morn- 
ing the shallop hove anchor ; sail was run up, and soon 
she was nosing her way again among the many islands 
of the great harbour. 

They sighted the white settlers' ship. The Swan, 
swinging idly at anchor, with not a soul on board. They 
landed. The careless wild settlers were scattered in 
the woods. Indians came in and out of the village, and 
even entered their houses. No one suspected anything. 
1 Standish at once told them how they stood in instant 



GREATHEART 165 

peril of their lives. The white men were called in. 
Standish ordered them to stay within the village and 
held the fear of death over them. 

An Indian spy came into the village. He carried 
furs for sale, but only as a pretence. His real aim was 
to see how the land lay. At once he saw that the secret 
was out, so he went back and told the other conspirators. 
These Indians came into the village. 

They drew their newly whetted knives; then they 
stood round Standish and began to threaten his life. 
He went with some of his men into a log-house; he 
wished to be where the other Indians from the woods 
could not shoot their arrows at them. In the house were 
Indian braves, knife in hand, thirsting for his blood. 

The Red Indian conspirators knew well enough that 
here was the really dangerous enemy of their plot. If 
they could slay him they could overwhelm the rest by 
sheer numbers. 

Standish's eye never left their faces, nor quenched 
its fire of courage. Suddenly he uttered a sharp word 
of command, and sprang at the nearest Indian. The 
log-house was a whirl of knives and swords. The sounds 
of the heavy breathing of men in desperate hand-to» 
hand fighting, of the sickening thud of falling bodies, 
and of the clash of steel on steel filled the place. Then 
the white men stood back. On the ground lay the In- 
dians. 

Standish, Winslow tells us,^ "gave the word to his 
men, and the door being fast shut, began himself with 
Peksuot, and, snatching his knife from his neck, though 
with much struggling, killed him therewith, the point 
whereof he [i.e. Peksuot the Indian] had made sharp 
* Winslow, Good Newes, pp. 37-45. 



166 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

as a needle and ground the back also to an edge. . . . 
But it is incredible how many wounds these pineses 
[braves] received before they died, not making any 
fearful noise, but catching at their weapons and striving 
to the last." 

Night fell; guards were set; but no Indian came 
within sight or sound of the sentries. 

When dawn came up the Indians tried to secure the 
crest of a hill, from which either the settlement or the 
edge of the woods could be commanded. Standish and 
his men, however, were too strong for them. 

The Indians hid behind trees, and, thus protected, 
shot flight after flight of arrows at the pale-faces. 

Then Hobomok did an act of great daring. He knew 
that the Eed Indians believed him to be a wizard who 
could call up evil spirits against his enemies. Suddenly 
he stood forward, flung his coat from him, and ran 
naked toward them. Smitten with the horror of evil 
spirits, the Indians turned and fled for their lives 
through the trees. Nor were they seen any more. 

The white settlers, who had drawn all this trouble on 
themselves by their wild, lawless ways, were sick and 
tired of the labour and the famine diet. They carried 
all their goods down to the beach, rowed it out in the 
boat to the Swan that lay at anchor in the bay, and 
sailed off never to return again. 

^'This was the end," Bradford sums it up for us, ^^of 
these that some time hosted of their strength (being all 
able, lustie men) and what they would doe and bring 
to pass, in comparison of the people hear [^.e. at Ply- 
mouth], who had many women and children and weak 
ones amongst them ; and said at their first arivall, when 
they saw the wants hear, that they would take another 



GREATHEART 167 

course, and not fall into shuch a condition, as this simple 
people were come too. But a mans way is not in his 
owne power ; God can make the weake to stand ; let him 
also that standeth, take heed least he fall." 

Standish, with his men and with Hohomok, went 
aboard the shallop and sailed back to Plymouth Har- 
bour. He set to work there to strengthen and finish the 
fort-church on the hill which — Bradford declared — ^was 
"stronge and comelie." 

On the flat roof cannon were placed and sentinels 
watched there day and night. 

Within the fort was the meeting-place for worship 
and the place where they held their town-meetings. 

Captain Standish — their Valiant-for-Truth — ^was the 
Commander of the fort. William Bradford — their 
Greatheart — was the wise and courageous Governor of 
the Council-meetings. William Brewster — their Mr. 
Standfast — was the leader of their worship. In the 
just and pure leadership of those three men, and in the 
quiet worship, the wise counsel, and the sure defence 
that centred in that log-building on the hill lay the 
strength of the Pilgrims — these ^'builders in the 
waste" — as they laid the foundations of new life in the' 
wild new world. 



EPILOGUE 
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW "AKGO" 



THE BFILDING OF THE SHIP 

Day by day the vessel grew. 

With timbers fashioned strong and true, 

Stemson and keelson and sternson-knee. 

Till, framed with perfect symmetry, 

A skeleton ship rose up to view! 

And around the bow and along the side 

The heavy hammers and mallets plied. 

Till after many a week, at length, 

Wonderful for form and strength. 

Sublime in its enormous bulk. 

Loomed aloft the shadowy hulk! 

And around it columns of smoke up-wreathing, 

Eose from the boiling, bubbling, seething 

Caldron, that glowed. 

And overflowed 

With the black tar, heated for sheathing. 

And amid the clamours 

Of clattering hammers. 

He who listened heard now and then 

The song of Master and his men: 

"Build me straight, O worthy Master, 

Staunch and strong, a goodly vessel 

That shall laugh at all disaster, 

And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!'' 

Longfellow. 



EPILOGUE 
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW "AEGO" 



After these adventures many strange and stirring hap- 
penings came upon the Pilgrims. But these are the 
beginning of a new story. 

For there came sailing to the harbour at the Ply- 
mouth Settlement, away there in the west, other men and 
women from England as colonists. The Little James, 
a pinnace of forty-four tons, the ship Annej, and then 
the ship Charity brought new faces to the colony. 
Gradually the Pilgrims of the Mayflower grew older 
and some died, while more and more new settlers came 
to the little town. 

Yet for thirty years William Bradford was every 
year re-elected as their Governor, for none was so wise 
and firm and kind as he. Brave Captain Standish, 
while he grew less fierce as he got older, was still the 
head of the defence of the settlement in face of enemies. 

At last the call came for Captain Miles Standish, the 
Pilgrims' Mr. Valiant-for-Truth. 

And we can say of him what John Bunyan wrote in 
The Pilgrim's Progress: 

"Then Mr. Valiant-for-Truth said, I am going to my 
Father's; and though with great difiiculty I have got 
hither, yet now I do not repent me cf all the troubles 

171 



172 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I 
give to him that shall succeed me in mj pilgrimage, 
and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My 
marks and scars I carry with me to be a witness for me 
that I have fought His battles who now will be my 
rewarder. 

^'When the day that he must go hence was come, 
many accompanied him to the riverside, into which as 
he went he said, ^Death, where is thy sting?' And 
as he went down deeper, he said, ^Grave, where is thy 
victory V 

''So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for 
him on the other side." 

The cheerful, strong face of William Brewster was 
with the Pilgrims for over twenty years, till in 1643, 
with his white hairs and his mellow face, honoured and 
loved by all the people, he died. 

Old William Brewster was indeed a Mr. Standfast; 
he had been the first to call the Pilgrims together to 
worship in the Manor at Scrooby. He took the brunt 
of the persecution in England. He led them across to 
Amsterdam and Leyden. He was their chief at the 
sailing of the Mayflower. For more than thirty-six 
years he faced with them exile and tempest, the arrows 
of the Indian and famine and pestilence on the soil of 
America. He led the Pilgrims, old and young, sinner 
and saint, into the presence of God. 

When William Brewster had come to be a white- 
haired old man four colonies of Englishmen had grown 
up on that coast of America ; they were Massachusetts, 
^New Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. Within 
ten days of William Brewster's death, these four colonies 
joined themselves together into one body. 



EPILOGUE 173 

They declared in their Articles of Confederation that 
all four colonies were founded with the same end, "to 
advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to 
enjoy the liherties of the Gospel in purity with peace," 
the confederacy to he called the United Colonies of ISTew 
England — "a league of friendship." 

That day saw the beginning of the union of states 
which was to become, in the dim distance of the years 
that were still hidden behind the mists of the future, 
the great republic — the United States of America, that 
noble Argo of which Longfellow wrote : 

"Sail on, O Ship of State! 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great! 

We know what Master laid thy keel. 
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel." 

That keel was laid when the Pilgrims (you remem- 
ber) ''in the presence of God and one of another," in 
the dim light between the decks on the Mayflower as 
she swung at anchor off Cape Cod, took up, one by one, 
the quill-pen from the captain's table and signed the 
covenant that made them one united body of free 
men.^ 

They laid, I say, in that hour, the keel of a new 
Argo, a more glorious ship of adventure for freedom in 
all the world. 

The Pilgrims, the Argonauts of Faith, had dared the 

rage of the gales of the Atlantic in their little ship, the 

Mayflower, in order to seek and to take the Golden 

Fleece. To them the quest was for liberty to worship 

* Chapter VI. 



174 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

in the way that seemed most fitting the God whose they 
were and whom they served. 

For that sacred prize they faced the fury of tempests, 
the bitter cold of freezing gales on a shelterless coast, 
the tomahawks and arrows of Eed Indians, the dreadful 
scythe of plague, and exile for life from the home of 
their fathers. 

On the shores of America, then, they laid the keel 
of the new Argo of freedom — the ship of the New Com- 
monwealth. Gradually as colony after colony grew up 
on that shore and spread from north to south, the first 
rough timbers of the hull of the ship were shaped and 
fixed. So, for year after year through three long 
centuries, the grandsons of the Pilgrims and multitudes 
of others have built America. 

The Mother-land in Britain across the Atlantic loved 
her child across the seas; but a King of England — a 
foreigner, who hardly knew even the language of his 
own subjects, together with some of his heavy-handed 
Ministers of State, tried to spoil the free lines of liberty 
on which the ship of America was being shaped. So 
the American builders, for love of liberty, defied the 
King — George III. America rebelled. The War of 
Independence began. That the heart of England was 
not truly with its King is shown by many things, among 
them the astonishing fact that great British generals — 
trained in the life of obedience — did a thing ahnost un- 
heard of in military history: they refused to obey the 
desire of their own King to go out and fight against the 
freedom of their brothers in America. 

The noblest sons of the Pilgrim settlers in the ISTew 
World gave their lives in the fight for freedom. That 
daring and wise soldier-statesman, George Washington, 



EPILOGUE 175 

led his people on from triumph in the battle-field to 
victory in the rebuilding of the world of America after 
the War of Independence. 

The new ship was being built. Her ribs were shaped 
on the great word : '^All men are bom free and equal.'^ 
On the planks of her decks was written the decree that 
Government "derives its just powers from the consent 
of the governed" ; and that the people who have made 
the Government have the right to abolish it and to cre- 
ate a new Government. 

The sons of the Pilgrims who left England for love 
of Liberty had thus through two centuries and a half 
wrought their will ; but in the Southern States of Amer- 
ica men of other minds had built up a great order of life, 
founded on the slavery of the negro. 

Then there rose the greatest leader that America has 
ever seen — a tall, gaunt backwoodsman, over six feet 
three in his moccasins, a man having a strong, seamed 
face, with a nose like a snow-plough, and a chin of 
granite — Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, with his face 
livid with anger, came out from the slave-auction room 
where he had seen girls sold like pigs in a market — 
came out grinding his teeth with wrath and declaring, 
"When I get the chance to hit slavery, I'll hit it hard." 
"This nation," he said later, "cannot go on half slave 
and half free." 

The Civil War began. So the banner of freedom 
was again fluttering at the head of the armies of liberty ; 
and after long and dreadful agony the battle of freedom 
was again won. "Government of the people, by the 
people, for the people," did not perish from the earth. 

The battle was won and the Ship of Union was finally 
launched upon the waters of time, though, even as she 



176 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

was lannclied, her Captain, Abe Lincoln, was shot and 
his hand dropped from the tiller of the mighty vessel. 
In that day Walt Whitman sung, above the prostrate 
body of that man who stands with the few greatest of 
the heroes of men in all history : 

O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 

The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is 
won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting. 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and 
daring ; 
But O heart! heart! heart! 
O the bleeding drops of red! 

Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

The Captain had fallen, but the ship survived. It 
was of her that Longfellow sung : 

. . . Sail on, O Ship of State! 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great! 
Humanity, with all its fears. 
With all its hopes of future years. 
Is hanging breathless on thy fate ! 
We know what Master laid thy keel. 
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel. 
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, 
What anvils rang, what hammers beat, 
In what a forge and what a heat 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! 
Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 
'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 
'Tis but the flapping of the sail. 
And not a rent made by the gale ! 
In spite of rock and tempest's roar, 
In spite of false lights on the shore. 
Sail on, nor fail to breast the sea ! 
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee. 



EPILOGUE 177 

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears. 
Are all with thee — are all with thee ! ^ 



II 

The years went by, and at last there broke on the 
world the greatest of all its battles for freedom — the 
War in which the nations and the races of the earth were 
locked in one tremendous conflict. In that war, the old 
land from which the Pilgrims were exiled and the New 
World to which they sailed were brothers. 

The war was won, but the old order of the world was 
shattered. As with the Mayflower on her tempestuous 
journey, so with the new ship of the life of the English- 
speaking peoples in the war : the timbers were strained, 
the sea leaked in — ^yes — even the mainbeam was 
wrenched from its place. 

Now on the shores of this new world of ours, after 
the war, all who have that spirit of adventure and of 
freedom and faith which were in the old Pilgrims are 
called to build a ship of a greater Union even than that 
of the United States of America — a greater Union than 
even that of all the English-speaking peoples in the 
earth — a Union of all men of all races everywhere joined 
in a common life of ordered freedom. 

They are called to build and to launch an Argo of 
Brotherhood sailing adventurously the waters of time 
under the spreading skies of the world-wide Fatherhood 
of God. 

That Argo will only be built and sail the seas to win 
* Longfellow, The Building of the Ship. 



178 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

the Golden Fleece of Freedom for all humanity if we 
who are her shipwrights and sailors are prepared to 
endure hardness, to live simply, and to act with courage 
as did the Argonauts of Faith, the story of whose deeds 
in England, Holland, and ximerica has now been told. 

As we look back over that story, especially we of the 
English-speaking peoples, whether of America or of the 
British Commonwealth of N^ations, it is good to call 
to mind the brave words of William Bradford: 

Our faitliers were English men which came over 
this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this 
willdernes, hut they cried unto the Lord, and he 
heard their voyce, and loohed on their adversitie. 
Let them therfore praise the Lord, because he is 
good, and his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let 
them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew 
how he hath delivered them from the hand of the 
oppressour. 

When they ivandered in the desert e [and^ 
willdemes out of the way, and found no citie to 
dwell in, both hungrie, and thirstie, their sowle was 
overwhelmed in them. 

Let them confess before the Lord his loving 
hi/ndnes, and his wonderfull works before the sons 
of men. 



THE END 



CHRONOLOGY 

1558. Elizabeth. 

1559. Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. 
1572. Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 

1583. Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, 

1584. William of Orange assassinated. 

1585. Raleigh plants Colony of Virginia. 
1588. Defeat of Spanish Armada. 

1590. William Bradford made Post Master of Scrooby 

Manor. 
1590-1610. Shakespeare writing continuously. 
1593. Barrowe and Greenwood executed. 
1600. Separatists begin to meet in Scrooby Manor. 
1603. James I. 

1605. Rembrandt born in Leyden. 
Gunpowder Plot. 

1608. First permanent English Settlement in America by 

the Virginia Company. 
Milton born. 

1609. Pilgrims cross to Amsterdam and thence travel to 

Leyden. 
Truce ending Twenty -five years' war of Spain and- 

Netherlands. 
1616. Shakespeare died. 
1618. Raleigh died. 

1620. Midsummer, Speedwell sails from Delfshaven to 

Southampton with Pilgrims en route to America. 
September 6th, Mayflower sails for America. 
November 9th, Mayflower sighted Cape Cod. 
November 11th, anchored and signed declaration. 
December 18th, Pilgrims settle at New Plymouth. 

1621. Treaty with Red Indians (Chief Massasoit). 
April 5th, Mayflower sails for England. 

179 



180 THE ARGONAUTS OF FAITH 

1621. November, Fortune arrives from England. 

1622. Canonicus threatens war. Massacre of English by- 

Indians at Virginia. 
1625. Charles I. 
1643. Death of William Brewster. 

Confederation of four American Colonies. 
1655, 1656 and 1657. Deaths of Edward Winslow, Miles 

Standish and William Bradford. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Alderton, one of the Pilgrims, 
132. 

Allerton, Isaac, one of tlie Pil- 
grims, 74, 139. 

Alva, Duke of, 59. 

Amsterdam, 49, 56, 57. 

Antwerp, 31, 32. 

Argo, Argus, 18, 19, 173, 174, 
177. 

Argonauts, 19, 20, 76, 173, 177. 

Armada, stories of Spanish, 40, 
41, 58. 

Articles of Confederation, 173. 

Aspinet, chief of Nanset tribe, 
144, 146, 156. 

B 

Barrowe, 26, 27, 33, 34. 

Boston, town, 43, 44. 

Bradford, William, Birth, 33; 
Boyhood, 40 ; Passage to Hol- 
land, 44-51; Life in Ley den, 
70 ; Marriage, 73 ; Captavn of 
Expedition, 76; Farewell to 
Leyden, 78 ; Voyage in ''May- 
flower," 90; Landing at Cape 
Cod, 102, 106-107; Death of 
his wife, 119; Story of spring 
1621, 127; Chosen Governor 
of Settle^ment, 138; Gover- 
norship,, Story of, 144-152, 
158; Indian plot, 164, 165; 
Quotations from "History of 
Plymouth Plantation," 40, 
47, 48, 50, 56, 59, 60, 78, 83, 



84, 88, 101, 108, 109, 111, 

112, 113, 114, 153, 155, 158, 

161, 162, 166, 178. 
Brewer, Thomas, 71. 
Brewster, William, 30-35, 39, 

42, 71, 73, 76, 90, 125, 128, 

152, 153, 172. 
Bunyan, John, 24, 44, 54, 64, 

72, 82, 88, 124, 150, 152, 172. 
Butten, William, 92. 



Canonicus, chief of Narragan- 
sett tribe, 155. 

Cape Cod, 95, 99, 111, 152. 

Carver, John, first Governor of 
Plymouth Settlement, 101, 
127, 130, 133, 138. 

Civil War (American), 175. 

Clarke, mate of May flower , 110, 
115. 

Clyfton, Richard, 34. 

Coles Hill (Burying Hill), 125. 

Confederation, Articles of, 181. 

Cooke, 126, 129, 132. 

Coppin, pilot of Mayflower, 110. 

Corbitant, Chief of Pocasset In- 
dians, 145, 146, 156. 

Covenant of Freedom, 101, 173. 

Cushman, Robert, 74. 



Davison, William, 31, 32. 
Delfshaven, 77, 120. 
Democracy — Form of Declara- 
tion, 101, 173. 



Compiled by Miss Edith Iverson. 
183 



184j 



INDEX 



E 

Elizabeth, Queen, 26, 27, 31, 32, 
155. 



Fens, description of, 43. 
Fortune, Pilgrim ship, 153, 154, 

158, 159. 
Fuller, Dr. Samuel, 74. 

G 

Golden Fleece, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 

76, 173, 177. 
Grampus Bay, 111. 
Great North Road, 28, 30, 31. 
Green door (House with), 72, 

74, 77, 122. 
Greenwood, 25, 27, 34, 35. 

H 

Haarlem, 60, 61. 

Hero of Haarlem, 57, 61. 

"Hiawatha," song of, 98, 118. 

Hobomok, 145, 157, 162, 163, 
166, 167. 

Holland (Netherlands or Low 
Country), talk of, 42, 58; 
love of freedom, 57, 59; free- 
dom to worship, 42, 60. 

Hopkins, Stephen, 91, 105, 126, 
140. 

Howland, John, 90, 92. 

Hudson, River, 94. 



Leyden, 59, 60, 65, 69, 74; 

siege of, 69. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 176. 
London Virginia Company, 76. 
Longfellow, 98, 118, 170, 173, 

176. 

M 

Manhattan, 94. 

Maps, England and Hollivnd, 
36; Cape Cod, 93; Plymouth 
Settlement, 131, 134. 

Massasoit, chief of Pohanoket 
tribes, 130-133, 140-143, 145, 
151, 157, 162-163. 

May (Dorothy), wife of Wil- 
liam Bradford, 73, 119. 

Mayflower, 84-90, 94, 99, 100, 
102, 103, 107-110, 119-121, 
137, 138, 172, 173, 177. 

Merchant adventurers, 76, 85. 

Morton, George, 153. 

Mbrton, Nathaniel, quotation, 
84, 116. 



N 



Neponsets, tribe of, 163, 165. 
Newbolt, Sir Henry, 38. 
New Commonwealth, 174. 



Oceanus Hopkins, 91, 140. 



.Ibdians, See Red Indians, Mas- 
"sasoit, Neponsets, Peksuot, 

Samoset, Tisquantum and 

Wampanoags. 



James I, 44, 71, 76, 100, 132. 
Jason, 17, 20. 

Jones, captain of Mayflower, 94, 
103, 109. 



Peksuot, the Indian, 165. 

Pilgrims, 41-44, 49, 55-62, 75, 
86-95, 99-108, 111, 114-116, 
120, 124, 125, 127, 130; 
church of, 72, 73; Council, 
161-162; scouts, 105, 109-118, 
119. 

Pilgrim's Progress. See Bun- 
yan. 



INDEX 



185 



Plymouth, 88; Bay, 120, 133, 
142; Harbour, 114, 120; 
Rock, 116; Settlement, 146, 
153, 157, 159, 171. 

Psalm Ixv, 148. 

R 

Red Indians, 102, 104-108, 111, 
113, 122-124, 125, 126, 154- 
166. 

Rembrandt, 58, 66, 68. 

Reynolds, captain of Speedwell, 
87. 

Robinson, John, 31, 35, 39, 60; 
pastor of Church in Leyden, 
71-73, 75, 76; farewell to Pil- 
grims, 77, 84. 

S 

Samoset, chief of Monhegan, 

127. 
Scrooby, 29, 30, 32, 44, 138; 

Manor House, 29, 32, 33, 34, 

40, 42, 172. 
Separatists, Church of, 56, 60. 
Shakespeare, 41, 67. 
Shelley's Hellas, 82. 
Smith, Captain John, 75, 92. 
Smyth, John, of Gainsborough, 

34. 
Speedwell, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 

120. 
Squant. See Tisquantum. 
Standish, Captain Miles, 73, 74, 

105-107, 109, 113, 114, 126, 

132, 146, 147, 151, 152, 156, 

164-167, 171, 173. 



Storks, 66. 

Swan, the, 164, 166. 



Tilley, Edward, 105. 
Tisquantum, the Interpreter, 

129, 130, 139, 140, 145-147, 

155-158. 
Treaty of New Commonwealth, 

133. 
Trent, 44. 

U 

United Colonies of New Eng- 
land, 173. 



Virginia, 138, 155. 
Voyages and Discoveries, Hak- 
luyt's, 40. 

W 

Wampanoags, tribe of, 128, 140, 
142. 

War of Independence, 175. 

Washington, George, 174. 

Wessagusset, 160, 162, 164. 

Weston, 158, 159. 

White, Peregrine, 110. 

Whitgift, Archbishop, 34. 

Whitman, Walt, 98, 136, 176. 

William of Orange, 71, 78. 

Winslow, Edward, of Droit- 
wich, 72, 74, 130-132, 140- 
152, 153, 157, 162, 163, 165. 



The England 




and Holland 
Pilgrims 11111 




fStcctute J^tYcs 
o JO 20 30 J90 so 



